The City In The Image Of Man
by Frozen Nitrogen
Summary: Part Shadow adaptation, part game-blending conspiracy mystery. A story which spans Tails Skypatrol to Sonic Chronicles, and follows Amy, Cream, and the Chaotix, as they struggle to escape the Machine City, Metropolis. Oh, yeah - and lotsa stuff blows up.
1. Prologue: An Island Without A Name

**_Author Note:_**

**_'Lo all, and welcome to Le New Fic.  
_****_Following Awdures' example, I include a 'Version of Reality' note with this chapter, since there's so many conflicting versions of Sonic canon that it's often hard to tell what yours truly is citing as rock-solid canonical fact, and what are merely alternate-universe nods, or the inventions of my own fevered imagiation. It's down at the end of the chapter, just to keep you guessing;_****_ this fic IS classified as Mystery, after all. So it's not supposed to make any sense to you _while_ you're reading it, is it?_**

**_As always, may you read without feeling the urge to kill yourself. Or me. _**

* * *

**Command I.D.: EM10 j17/22.6  
Timestamp: MY11.119 - 60.5.30  
Database Inquiry: South Island Archipelago  
Authorization: Doctor Ivo Robotnik**

_**Database Inquiry: **_

_Geologically, South__ Island Archipelago comprises at least seven thousand islands at low tide, both coral and volcanic, of which four-hundred and nine exceed five square kilometres in area._

_The volcanic islands themselves, and the atolls' bedrock, is principally of basaltic - _

_**Access cancelled**_

_**Parametric refinement…**_

**Command I.D.: EM10 j17/22.7  
Timestamp: MY11.119 - 60.5.42  
Database Inquiry: ****South Island Archipelago**** 41.004 West, 21.229 South****  
Authorization: Doctor Ivo Robotnik**

_**File access (last update MY11.095)**_

_Designation__: SIA-97-b  
__Geological feature__: Volcanic island  
__Area__: 11.2 km²  
__Indigenous population__:  
Mobian: sciurus mobius, sialia greenhillus: 1,100 (estimate)  
Population roboticized MY5.053 to MY5.056  
__Development__:  
Medium-scale military/industrial complex  
Mining and automated railcar network operative MY6.106 to Present  
'Metal Island' automated aeronautics production facility operative MY6.108 to Present  
__Force deployment__:  
'Darkcastle' fortress complex operative MY6.189 to Present  
Standard munitions – 1,130 (One-thousand, one-hundred and thirty) ton  
Special munitions (nuclear, antimatter, acausal) – 0 (Zero)  
Badnik deployment – SIA 12__th__ Division (garrison)_

_**View Zonal surveys? YES / NO  
View production reports? YES / NO  
View force deployment details? YES / NO **_

It was typical. Utterly, unremarkably, typical. This island didn't even have a name in the database. 'SIA-97-b', the cartographic programs called it. Robotnik hadn't coded his mapmakers for creative flair, back then; in those heady, early days, when his first badniks had torn across the archipelago, a relentless wave of order and metal. There were hundreds of others like it, that the machines had built in his name; metalized factory atolls which that Eggman had never visited in person. The island had been just another conquest; its ores another resource; its original inhabitants – another badnik legion.

Six years ago! It had been six years since the start of that first campaign... and he was back_ here_, back in this loathsome island chain. Back where he had _started_. South Island itself was barely a horizon away.  
What did he have to show for it, for six years of exertion? The Wing Fortress was gone; and the Flying Battery. All that remained of the Death Egg was fiercely radioactive slag in low orbit. The Floating Island evaded detection, the Veg-O-Fortress lay in ruins. Uncountable thousands of badniks had been built up and torn down. What had he _gained_?

The Doctor stroked his ginger moustache with one pudgy hand, as his other glove tapped the piloting controls. He _had_ gained something in those six years: knowledge. And that was a commodity immeasurably more valuable than mere power, or territory.

Now, as it had six years ago, the Egg-O-Matic roared over gentle swells, its grav-plating's vortices throwing spray in the Doctor's face as he glared at the blinking screen.  
Mid-afternoon sunlight painted the shallow sea a glorious azure; tropical fish scattered before his wake, and the chittering chevron of Buzz Bombers that flew ahead of the scientist's vehicle. Robotnik didn't spare the fish a glance; not even in contempt. He only had eyes for the data, pitiful as it was.  
This was _it? _This was all the information he had on the island? _A bland typicality!?  
_Whatever mundane part it had played in the past… from today, every square inch that un-named island, 'SIA-97-b' – it would _crawl _with sensor-bots.

Biting back a snarl of frustration, that he wasn't there _already_, the Doctor cranked his speed higher, listening to the whine of the badniks' engines as his wasp-like escorts did the same. The Egg-O-Matic, a squashed spheroid of grey and black, dropped even closer towards the surface of the sea, as the Lens-Thirring manipulators warped gravity _forwards_ instead of _upwards_.

Eight days ago, the fox had arrived on SIA-97-b. Alone. Alone! He might… he _should _have gone then, gone to _ensure _the garrison destroyed that airborne pest. It would have saved the Doctor from his present, bedraggled state. And this desperate haste.

But he had been otherwise engaged, for the Battle Kukkus were mobilizing – at _last_. Consequently, the Doctor's attentions were required further east. The birds were using _his _weapons, and _his _charts… they were performing _his _work, irrespective of what their Fifteenth Emperor believed. And so Robotnik had to ensure that they performed it _well_, given his own forces were depleted and disarrayed.  
Besides, SIA-97-b's garrison force could handle one pestilent sidekick.

Five days ago, Robotnik realized that they could not. He had unilaterally excused himself from a meeting with 'Doctor' Fukorokov, the Kukku's chief 'scientist' – much to the elderly owl's indignation – and surveyed the incoming damage reports with a mounting fury that had nothing to do with Fukorokov's insufferable obstinacy. The Doctor dispatched the 9th Division from Metropolis, to reinforce those badniks on SIA-97-b.

That should have been enough.

Three days ago, he realized something else, as well. Perhaps too late. A tiny fact, hiding subtly in the fragmented data-streams of 9th Division's surviving machines.  
A tiny fact that made his skin crawl, made him leave Battle Kukku territory immediately.  
Something that could not be. Something that MUST not be.

* * *

It was night by the time he arrived. Cloud cover had pulled in, blocking out the stars, and muting even the largest moons' light to a smear of silver in the east. Not that clear skies would have afforded him any advantage. He had no spy satellites left; they hadn't survived the Doomsday Zone.

That… that was something the Doctor tried not to remember too often. His entire form drenched in sweat, stuffed inside a spacesuit never designed for the punishing accelerations he was forced to initiate. The scratchy rattle in his respirator, as the suit struggled to keep pace with his ragged breathing. His mind afire with desperation and panic; and that… light, outside.  
Hammering on the hull.  
Hammering.  
_HAMMERING_.

Grains of sand swirled beneath his floating vehicle, as the Egg-O-Matic climbed the beach of SIA-97-b. The dim moonlight offered scant illumination to this auspicious landfall; beyond the puddle of yellow from his pod's single headlamp, the Doctor was flying blind. A tang of sea-salt hung in the air, and the sickly petroleum scent of a transport barge.

His metallic minions had arrived on the island before him, of course: the South Island Archipelago 8th Division, scrambled from nearby SIA-43-a. His hastily-assembled escort, the Buzz Bombers, hovered noisily above the Egg-O-Matic, exchanging electronic protocols with the 8th's divisional network. Announcing that the Creator Himself was present on the island.

"Report!" Robotnik barked, impatience in his voice utterly lost on the robotic host. The mechanical wasps were not programmed to interpret such inflectional subtlety. Without voice synthesizers, they couldn't reply, either; the Buzz Bombers' collective response scrolled up the Egg-O-Matic's display, flanked by the appropriate identification serials.

"_Destination: 2.45km southwest"_

"And the target's status?" the obese scientist demanded, already turning his bulbous machine along the shoreline.

"_Viable but deteriorating. Insufficient data to estimate remaining operating time."_

"An exceptionally helpful assessment," Robotnik muttered, as he powered the craft forwards. As always, urgency eroded what little sufferance he cultivated.

More than once, as the mechanical party progressed down the beach, the Doctor glimpsed wreckage in the white sands. A screw, or a fragment of steel plating, already beginning to tarnish under the seawater's ruinous influence. The hedgehog was trouble enough; but if even his orange protégée could rip two divisions to shreds and escape unscathed…  
Still. Those Mobians might be the least of his problems, if SIA-97-b held what he _thought_ it held.

Presently, he arrived at the 8th Division's perimeter. Scavenging electronics from the island's ruined facilities, his badniks had erected a semicircle of floodlights around the target, banishing the oppressive darkness on this one stretch of shoreline. Over one hundred and fifty robots crowded at the edge of the electric brilliance, claws and spikes glinting as the Doctor's pod floated towards them. The rest of the 8th was combing the island, looking for more finds. Finds like this.

Robotnik lowered the Egg-O-Matic onto the beach, and hefted his spheroid form out of the pod. Grains adhered to the gloss-black of his lab shoes as their heels sunk deeply into the sand – but the Doctor barely even noticed. Incredulity tinged with dread; that was what occupied his thoughts, as he waddled towards the thing which had brought him all the way out here. Three day's travel, three days of sleeping at the controls, three days of eating nothing but the pod's emergency rations. The taste of powdered egg still clung to his tongue.

She was huddled over a campfire. It was a pitiful, flickering thing, of driftwood and kerosene, doubtless looted from one of the island's smashed robots. A shallow metal pan – the chest-plate from a turtle-bot, if he wasn't mistaken – hung above the flames. Something black simmered in there, giving off the scent of boiled cockles. Even as Robotnik approached, she prodded the fire with a crooked stick. The figure appeared completely oblivious to the badnik's presence, or the noisy trudging of their gargantuan master.

_She was human._

To describe her as 'old' was, the Doctor thought, to squander a rare opportunity of using the word 'antediluvian'. The woman was a withered husk, with a face to rival the gargoyles of Castle Robotnik itself. She was garbed in a formless black robe of some unidentifiable fabric; a dirty scrap of cloth, that might have once been a cape, hung from her shoulders. Lank, silvery hair cobwebbed across the woman's brow; the rest was lost under the brim of an absurd, conical hat. That was black, too; bent and crumpled, like the crone herself.

The Doctor just stood there. Watching, as she pulled the stick out of the fire, and traced a spiral pattern into the sand.  
He had not laid eyes on another human being for over a decade.  
He had hoped never to do so again.

Without turning from the fire, she spoke; a scratchy, grating rasp. "Now, now, young man. Don't be shy," the woman – did she just call him 'young man'? – instructed.  
"Come, sit down with old Wendy. Supper's nearly ready, it is, it is. Wendy bets a big lad like you wouldn't turn down a bowl o' soup, eh?"  
The crone threw back her head, cackling: apparently hysterical at her own 'biting wit'.

_Another human. Here, on Mobius._

His shoes crunched in the sand, as Robotnik circled around the flame: a bloated monster in claret and yellow, he prowled; prowled around the little old lady, and her makeshift fire. As monsters always had, since the very dawn of history.

"Wendy told them the same, she did," the wizened figure crooned, thrusting a gnarled finger in the direction of the badnik's perimeter. "She did, she did, she said that they could have soup too, if they came to sit with Wendy. Plenty for everyone, plenty for everyone, and mint candies for afters!"

"Tell me how you came here," the Doctor ordered, in a voice devoid of his usual bombast. Robotnik had never been one to ask nicely.

She either hadn't heard him, or simply ignored the demand. Murmuring to herself, the woman reached into the folds of her ebon robe. Behind, silently, mantisbots scuttled forwards, ready to defend their Creator by bisecting this ancient creature, had she _somehow _disguised a weapon from their tetrahertz scans.  
But, true to her words, the crone's hand emerged holding… a sweet. It really was a mint candy, its white and green wrapper sitting in stark contrast to the parchment yellow of the crone's skin.

The Doctor had not seen one of _those _for closer to two decades.

"A good boy, a good boy, to come and see Wendy, come and see Witchcart, yes, yes, a good boy, the egg-man is a good boy. Not like the fox, no, no, the tricky fox, not like him, so he can have one before his soup, he can, he can. Only one, though, only one. Don't want to end up like old Wendy, does he?"  
Toothless, blackened gums grinned at Robotnik, as the madwoman leaned forwards, holding the candy out for him. Her eyes wandered crazily, never lingering in one place for long.  
They wandered… independently of each other.

The Doctor stepped closer, despite the anxious whirring of his steel children. His bulky hands dwarfed those of the shriveled witch, as he took the tiny sweet. Holding it up in the floodlight's megawatt glow, as if the simple, stripy wrapper were the most interesting thing in the world to him.

_She was really here. On Mobius!? On HIS PLANET!?_

"Yes, yes, candy, candy, the fox likes mint candy, the tricky fox, yes," Witchcart babbled. "Steal it, steal it, he wants to steals it, he does, but Wendy gives it freely, yes, yes. The egg-man, the egg-man, he wears red, he does, he does, but no, but no, but no, he's not the one Wendy wants. He's a good boy, the egg-man is, to come and see Wendy…"

Amidst her speech, Robotnik raised one foot out of the sand. And, casually; as though it were the most natural thing in the world; he kicked over the old woman's pan. The thin, watery soup tipped into her struggling fire, extinguishing it without even a whisper of smoke.

The witch fell silent at that.

He did something with his hands; sign language, of some sort. There was a flash of silver, and suddenly, the mantisbots were there, bladed limbs at her neck. The crone didn't so much as twitch, as the badniks wrapped their claws around her. With the kind of precision you only get from a razorblade held to the throat, the automata forced their prisoner to incline her head. Forced the ancient woman to face Him, the Father of Machines.

"You do _not _ignore me." Robotnik told her.

He crossed his arms behind his back, and bent forwards, leaning in close to the immobilized Witchcart. "It is a sad day, don't you think, when the young must teach proper manners to their elders? And appropriate decorum is _so_ important when meeting new people."  
Beneath the scent of filth, her breath smelt of mints.

"Now, let's try again, shall we? _Tell me how you came here_."

A dry rattle rose from between those withered lips. It took the Doctor a few seconds to realize what it was. She was laughing. _At_ him.

The scientist's moustache twitched. And then:  
"TELL ME WHO SENT YOU!" the Eggman roared, grabbing the witch's black-clad forearms, already restrained by the mantisbots' scythe-arms. He was a mechanic – that was one of his seven doctorates, anyway – and beneath the fat, there lay a mechanic's muscles; the strength enough to wrestle with metal. He could snap this frail woman's arms like matchsticks, if he chose. He could and he _would_, if she didn't answer him.  
"Was it Regis? Did he find my equations? Or the Federal Council? Do they know I survived?! Nation; did Nation send you? Are they coming for me? Do they know who I am!? DO THEY KNOW ME!?"

He was shaking her, Robotnik realized, so the mantisbots were having difficulty _not _cutting into the parchment skin. And she was already dying, as the Buzz Bombers had pointed out. The Doctor corralled his rage, and exhaled, fixing Witchcart with that gaze that cowed even _machines_.  
"Tell me how you came here. Do it now, before I decide to be… impolite."

But he had hurt her, he realized, and more than he had anticipated. The withered old woman didn't laugh this time; the rattling wheeze in her throat had nothing to do with levity. Witchcart's leathery eyelids fluttered, as she rasped out the words.

"No more candy… for him, no, no more. We goes now, Wendy goes. He's a good boy… but he has a temper, he does, the egg-man. The other one, no... Wendy didn't find him. Let nature takes its course, she will… yes; yes…"  
The witch continued to draw breath, but it was shallow. Painful, no doubt.

She had finally said something funny. _His _voice was mirthful, this time, and he beamed at the dying woman, a half-moon grin blossoming under his walrus moustache. "Oh. Didn't you hear?" the Doctor asked, tipping his neck to match the crone's sinking head. Even as her senses faded, that made her focus. As the floodlights blazed in his glasses, the egg-man was smiling a smile she recognized: it was a smile of madness.

"Doctor Robotnik doesn't _let_ nature take its course."

* * *

**_Author Note: The Promised Continuity Refresher_**

**_You've probably guessed by now; this _actually is_ SEGASonic. Just... a bit warped, in that since this is_****_ set before Sonic Adventure, Eggman still is (or at least thinks he is) the only human on Sonic's planet. Plus_**** there's a lot in that chapter that draws from the majorly-obscure games Tails Skypatrol and Tails Adventure. Even I've not played those through to the end, and I** **wrote_ this travesty. _****_So:_**

**_Frozen Nitrogen's Refresher Course In Obscure Game Storylines!  
From this chapter's point of view, the last two games to occur are Sonic & Knuckles, then Tails Skypatrol, with the events of Tails Adventure looming on the horizon. In Tails Skypatrol, it was essentially just Tails fighting some witch who lived on an island, and fuelling his flying spree by consuming an incredible amount of mint candy. In Tails Adventure, the fox fights some birds, the Battle Kukkus (who have a SUSPICIOUS amount of military hardware), while they're invading some other island._**

**_And that's as complex as those game plots get. So there.  
It goes into _far _more familiar territory with subsequent chapters. Games that more than 3 people have actually played. I promise._**

**_And five points if anyone can tell me who Regis is._**


	2. City On Fire

"You'll never stop him!" she yells, tears streaming down her face. Her hair is a mess, the rosy quills hanging into her eyes even as she screams at the nightmare.  
"He'll come for me! He'll come for me and he'll smash you up! He'll make you wish that fat man had never built you!" Crimson lightning tears apart the sky, but her voice is loud and clear.  
"You don't stand a chance against someone with a real heart! He'll come for me because he loves me!"

Its hands are ice, and its eyes are dead, as it lifts her higher. It is everything he is not. Hard, and cold, and utterly without pity. Everything she hates, in the shape of everything she loves. It just stares at her, with those unwavering red pupils. The metal fingers tighten around her neck; despite herself, she can't help but gasp with fear. It's _toying_ with her.

"You're just a copy! A bad copy! You know that? You're nothing like him! His eyes are green, and his fur is darker than your stupid paint-job!"  
There is no change in its metal face, no matter how much she thrashes and kicks. Sickly red light glows through the churning clouds above them, painting the entire Stardust Speedway the colour of blood. It hoists her further into the air, as though offering the hedgehog up to the roiling tempest.

"Sonic! SONIC!" Only the thunder replies to her. Fear creeps into her chest, now; nibbling away at the diamond-hard certainty of rescue. He is coming for her; she knows that, in the very core of her being. But what if he's hurt, what if he's not quite fast enough, what if he's…

It can't smile. It can never smile, just one more thing that makes it so different from her precious one. But there is something in Metallix; something that has seen her fear, and _enjoys_ it.

The robot Sonic draws back its other fist, and  
-and it glances sideways-  
but too late, far too late. A flash of blue, just a little darker than Metal's own plating, and the imitation is gone. She screams as she spins through the air, flying over the edge of the ruined highway; but he's here, he's _here_! Silhouetted against poison clouds, in the Bad Future of a world that is not their own. He's here!

He catches her, and they land gently on the rusted steel of the causeway. Even here, even now, in this terrible place; he's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. Every time she looks at him, she sees something new that takes her breath away. The way his fur stands on end just a tiny bit, charged with static from the speed of his movement. How did she not notice it before?

"Amy…" he breathes, and her heart melts just to hear him speak her name. With utmost tenderness, he brushes the quills away from her eyes.  
His touch really _is_ electric, she thinks.  
"Amy, did it hurt you? Are you okay?" The concern in his voice, the worry in his eyes; those perfect, jade eyes…

"_Amy, we have to get out of here!"_

"Oh, Sonic, I love you too!" she replies. But… wait… that's not right.

"_Amy, get up! Get up!"_

"I… what?" This isn't how it should go. The next line is: "Please, Amy, will… will you marry me?" – spoken with a kind of shy hesitancy, that he never shows to anyone else; that makes her insides turn to molten gold.

"_Damnit, hedgehog! GET UP!"_

Why is Sonic green?  
…and why is Stardust Speedway exploding?

* * *

The old ones said it hadn't always been like this.

But there weren't so many of them left, not after the purges; and their voices fell on deaf ears. The autoschools taught things a little differently. Besides, the newer inhabitants had enough trouble surviving, without listening to the revisionist murmurs of those bitter fools. Civic history was a dangerous topic.

Even the name of the place was contentious. The Glorious Metropolis Of The Ineffable Father– that was how you named it in the public spaces, where they watched you closely. Robotropolis, or Metropolis – these names were tolerated. Usually. But you glanced behind, before you spoke the word. Some of the robots, some of older models; they were more… puritanical than others. The Eggrobos were the worst; those clanking, rotund facsimiles, paint faded and scuffed, shuffling through the filthy streets on failing servos. The few that were left; they were the most devout, the most unforgiving. Any name but The Glorious Metropolis Of The Ineffable Father, and you could find yourself facing a correctional beating, or Redemption Through Labour.

Other names were more dangerous, names whispered behind cupped hands, spoken only when you knew there were no spyports nearby, and when you truly trusted those you addressed. The Machine Hell; The Land Of Darkness. Some names were taken from the humans' language, with connotations few Mobians understood. The Ninth Circle; The Steel Purgatory. Names that could see you taken in the middle of the night, and your friends would never see you again.  
Or worse: they _would _see you again.

And some names… very few knew them. Because if the machines even _suspected _you had heard another speak it; if you had ever lingered in a blind spot with someone who had screamed the name in the Punishment Spheres; then they wouldn't just take you. They would take the entire population of your complex, take them to the Cathedral Of Transformation. They would go to your domicile, and they would cleanse it - burn every object, every surface, every secret place where you might have inscribed the words.

Even amongst the machines, few understood the significance of those names, of why the Father commanded they be rooted out with such uncompromising ruthlessness. They simply obeyed, and listened.

From the highest spires to the dank bowels of the under-city, they listened. The burnished copper domes of a thousand habitation complexes bristled with surveillance equipment. Below, and inside; the streets, the workspaces, the recreation commons: through hidden microphones and cameras, they listened. Many of the devices were broken, by casual vandalism or simply neglect. You just didn't know _which _ones.

The old ones said it hadn't always been like this.  
The city wasn't always turned in on itself; paranoid.

Perhaps if they'd aimed a few of those sensors _outwards_, the croc thought wryly, then The Glorious Metropolis Of The Ineffable Father wouldn't be in such a mess right now.

"Another dropship! Behind the towers!" The floor shook as a further salvo pummelled their position.

"He's… he's right, there's more of them…" To the east, something exploded. It sounded like something _large_.

"We're out of time, Vector! We have to leave, _now!_" Crackling weapons-fire ricocheted off the steel floor, throwing shards of metal over their heads.

"Is… is she okay, Mister Vector? Can we… is it safe to move her?"

"What am I, a doctor?" the crocodile growled. "But Espio's right. We can't leave her behind and we can't stay here-" a ripple of pink energy smashed into the wall at their backs, as if to emphasise that particular fact; "-so I guess that means we're moving her. You've got Cheese, right?"

The demure rabbit nodded, clutching the chao tightly to her dust-covered dress. She looked like a ghost, blanketed a dull grey by fallen plaster and pulverised duracrete. Espio was… well, you couldn't tell where the rubble stopped and the chameleon began. Which, Vector supposed, was the entire point.

The sounds of battle crashed on all sides; alarms and explosions and the strange warbling noises of the alien's weaponry. Tentatively, the croc raised his eyes over their rapidly-crumbling bulwark – drawing a renewed hail of enemy ammunition for his trouble. What a day.

The invaders were crawling towards them, threading a path through the debris with all the grace of an impatient locomotive. They really _did _have to move.  
As carefully as he could, with all hell breaking loose around them, Vector scooped the semi-conscious hedge-girl of the scorched crater where she lay, and unceremoniously clamped his massive jaws down on the pink creature. Lucky for _him, _female hedgehogs didn't have back-spines.

"Rea-ry?" he managed, barely audible over the renewed bombardment of the creatures' dropships. With no response from the rabbit, Vector glanced back over his shoulder.  
Cream was looking at him with an expression of such absolute horror that Vector couldn't help feeling criminally guilty. But, for all the hedgehog looked like a fresh kill, dangling limply in his reptilian jaws, she was safer there than slung over his shoulder.  
They didn't have time for this, though. Their position was entirely indefensible.  
Cream – somewhat mollified as Amy's eyes fluttered, proving that the towering sauropod had not just bitten her in half – didn't resist as Vector grabbed her hand. Behind the rabbit, something shifted in the rubble that was _presumably _Espio's signal of readiness.  
"Rokay, ren. Hree… rwo… ron…"  
The ragtag trio of Mobians leapt from their latest hiding place, and into the crossfire of Metropolis Precinct Echo-Lambda.  
They had not picked a very good time to do it.

Vector crouched low as he ran, attempting to make himself (and Amy) as small a target as possible. It wasn't an easy task. The croc was taller than some full-grown humans. And dust-covered or not, lime green scales weren't ideal urban camouflage by any standards. Airborne fragments pinged against the chitinous ridges on his back, as bolts of power corkscrewed into the roadway around him. Vector's attention was focused so much on avoiding the smoking potholes that he scarcely realised his route was carrying him directly towards an advance squad of the invaders.

They were lumbering, ungainly creatures; leathery bodies ranging from jet black to pallid grey, the monochrome broken only by splashes of scarlet on their crests and hands. Mouthless faces turned towards the dashing reptile – together with large, glowing handguns.

There were three of them. And carrying Amy, he didn't stand a chance of avoiding the barrage...

But they never got the chance. On the right, a fountain of green ichor burst from the creature's knee as a kunai knife found its target; on the left, with the cry of "Chao!", an azure blur struck the trooper right between its compound, insectile eyes. Shoulders lowered, Vector charged full-pelt into the final alien – and they were through, darting into the (comparative) safety of a ruined manufactory.

"No, no, keep going!" Espio yelled, a ghostly ripple of grey and brown temporarily visible against the subtly altered backdrop. "They're right behind-"

A thunderous roar drowned out the rest of his sentence; drowned out _everything _else, even to Vector's Crush-40-hardened eardrums. The fleeing Mobians were thrown to the floor as gouts of flame exploded through the factory's ruined windows. Luckily for them, most of the glass had _already_ been shot out.

It was precious seconds before anyone dared move again. Vector winced as he levered himself off the corrugated floor. Dimly-perceived, golden geometries danced at the edge of his vision, before the scattered rings faded back into whatever half-reality they came from. It had been all the crocodile could do to avoid crushing Amy when he fell, and there had been little opportunity to cushion the landing for himself. He had bounced _quite _a long way.

Behind them, the street was transformed into a scorching inferno. His detective's perceptions couldn't help hazarding a guess at what had happened: it looked like the Black Arms' dropships had been blown out of the sky. Shadows flitted amidst the fires; angular silhouettes, darting back and forth over the alien wreckage. Vector shook his head. You _really _knew you were having a bad day when you were _relieved _to see badniks arrive on the scene.

He found Cream a few feet away. Mostly by the sound of her coughing, as the rabbit was still camouflaged well enough to rival Espio. The diminutive mammal's ears were folded down on top of her head. As the crocodile slid towards her, a pair of chocolate-brown eyes raised up to look at him. "Where-"

Vector raised a finger to his mouth, motioning for absolute silence.

It was obvious what would happen next. The shadows in the smoke were combing over the downed craft, ruby-red sensor beams hunting methodically. Not so much searching for survivors as _ensuring there were none_. And while the city's defenders weren't _actively _trying to kill him, Vector was quite right in presuming that Metropolis' besieged garrison wouldn't hesitate to level this building, just to eliminate the _possibility _that Black Arms had escaped inside. All it might take was a single noise.

And Cream's muffled coughing sounded awfully loud, even as the fires raged outside...

The scanning lasers flashed through the factory's shattered windows; crimson pinpricks, creeping over the broken stone and metal.  
Past Espio.  
Past Vector and Cream, desperately trying to remain silent.  
A flash of silver, and…  
The badniks zipped away into the smoke, their battle still far from over. Vector didn't realise he'd been holding his breath until he released it. He gave Cream a belated thumbs-up while he was at it, permitting the rabbit to resume hocking the dust out of her lungs at whatever volume she liked.

Glancing over at Amy, the crocodile saw that she was still out of it. Her headband had fallen off, somewhere between the street and the factory, but besides that, the hedgehog could have just been sleeping. In a ditch full of plaster dust and shrapnel, but still-

"AWW, man! That was so-o-o-o _cool_!!" exclaimed a voice from the rafters. "They were all, like 'pew, pew', and then it was all 'ker-blamo!'"  
Buzzing, half-covered in soot, and grinning like a manic; the third member of Chaotix dropped into view, alighting on a pile of discarded machine parts. "Hi Espio. You miss me?" he asked, antennae writhing like fat, stripy worms.

The 'pile of machine parts' opened a large, golden eye, regarding the bee with long-suffering irritation. "Charmy, you're shtood on my fathce."

"Well maybe you shouldn't hide so well, then?" the juvenile insect retorted. His undiminished smirk made it clear that he'd known exactly what he was landing on; that, and the fact that he made no effort to move at all. Turning instead to Vector, the bug snapped off his flight-goggles and made a childish approximation of a salute. "Special Agent Charmy Bee reporting mission accomplished, Boss! Do I get a medal now, seeing as it's wartime and all? Huh? Do I? I think I should."

Charmy was the smallest, youngest, and self-proclaimed 'most annoying' member of the Chaotix Detective Agency. He was also _incredibly _late.  
The croc's relief at seeing Charmy alive and well was largely cancelled out by the fact that '_I'll just go up there and see what's goin' on, Boss; five minutes, max!'_ had just taken the insect over three hours. Conflicting sentiments that were not entirely captured by Vector's exasperated yell of: "And where, exactly, have _you _been?"

"Umm…" Charmy began, his face falling as it became obvious that the reptile wasn't going to welcome him back with sweets and a raise. The bee shifted his feet sheepishly, smearing charcoal all over Espio's back - thereby proving even more of an inconvenience to the chameleon by accident than by design. Which was often how it went.

"…chimney." He eventually responded. And, pre-empting a pair of raised crocodile eyebrows, "They was shooting at me, boss! The robots _and_ the gross aliens. They're _re-e-e-ealy _going at it out there. There were lasers and giant worms and about a million Egg Pawns and – hiya Cream – and they were all blastin' everything and you should've seen when they blew the big statue up, it was all "woosh!" and so I had to fly down this chimney to get out of the way and it was really dark and… and… and why is Cream here?"

"_We_ havn't got that far yet," Espio remarked levelly, having at last succeeded in rolling out from under the bee's feet. The chameleon had resumed his neutral, magenta colouration - apart from the sooten footprints stamped over his torso, which he was vainly attempting to dust off. "The Black Arms advanced along Rho-Delta about half an hour after you left, and we spotted her with the refugees." Unlike his camouflage, however, the alertness about Espio did not fade away. The ninja's saffron gaze ran across the factory's blasted walls, checking for escape routes, or Metropolis' ubiquitous security cameras.

"And then we found Amy," Vector finished, gesturing in the hedgehog's direction, where Cream and Cheese were attempting to pull their unconscious friend upright.

Hovering above the debris-strewn floor, the bee persisted; "But why is she-"

"You can play twenty questions when we're not stood in a warzone, Charmy!" the crocodile told him. "Speaking of which, did you spot a way out of the fighting while you were up there?"

"There's a-"

"One that _doesn't _involve running through gunfire."

"Err… that's… umm." The bee's brow furrowed.  
"We-e-e-e-ell… there's badniks over _there, _and the aliens were moving in from _there _and _there_ before they knocked the statue down, so-o-o-o… _that_ way!" Triumphantly, Charmy levelled a soot-blackened glove towards the iron girders in the factory's ceiling. "If we get onto the roof we can go over all the worms and mechs and there's a walkway that'll get us inside this big building that the chimneys were on top of! That… should be okay?"

Vector blinked. They were _that close_ to the edge of the combat zone? If Charmy had only _one _skill… well, that would have to be 'annoying people'. But pathfinding came a close second, and the bee had not disappointed him this time. Besides, standing around discussing the route didn't seem a particularly attractive prospect. From the smell of things, the fire in the street had begun to creep inside the factory. There was an ominous vibration in the floor, too; he didn't know what that was, but it probably wasn't anything good.

Alright then. The roof it was.

"You got that, Cream?" the crocodile asked, turning towards her and Amy. "Onto the roof, across the walkway, into the building with the chimneys. I'll…" the words 'carry Amy again' never made it out of his mouth, as Cream grabbed hold of her friend defensively the moment he started the sentence.

"M-Mister Vector... um... I can carry Amy, so there's no need for... for you to..."

"...I'll take the stairs. You and Charmy carry Amy."

"Hey!" complained the indignant insect behind him. But the crocodile was already bounding up the corkscrew staircase, towards the building's shattered skylights. Espio jogged up the wall beside him, as much a ease on a vertical surface as a horizontal equivalent. The chameleon wore a knowing grin, that Vector pretended not to see.

They had been fortunate, really, that they happened to run into _this _factory. It was old; older than the other plants in Precinct Echo-Lambda. More recent additions to the city's urban landscape did not include such extravagancies as windows or fire escapes.  
The ceiling hatch swung open with a protesting squeal of hinges long un-oiled. As Vector hoisted himself out into the smoke-wreathed roof, the roar of battle rushed back into his ears with a vengeance. A squadron of Egg Drones screamed overhead; Cream and Charmy had to duck out of their way, Amy swinging dangerously between them. Down in the street, spherical Roller badniks ploughed through the burning slag of the Black Arm's dropships, inch-thick titanium armour shielding them from the furious heat of the plasmatic fires. Meanwhile, that vibration was getting stronger.

"Charmy! Which way!?" Vector yelled. The bee had next to zero chance of hearing him, but he was dragging Amy and Cream through the ashen air with a clear direction in mind.  
The metal roofing beneath their feet was growing warm as the detectives sprinted after their airborne guide.  
And Espio looked worried, which was perhaps the most damning indictment of the situation.

Above them, red clouds swirled. The Black Arms had brought the fearsome tempest with them, for reasons as much theological as military. And something was moving inside; something in no way holy. The source of the vibration became suddenly apparent to Vector, as a metal hull broke through the sanguine mists.

The vessel plunged out of the sky, blasting through the blanket of alien weather with such speed that it seemed predestined to slam straight into the city. It's matte black underside bristled with weapons and sensors, clearly visible to Vector and Espio as they threw themselves down onto the hot metal of the walkway; a lot of good it would have done, with a thousand tonnes of warship hurtling down upon them. But then antigravity drives kicked in at the final instant, etching radioactive flux lines into the clouds. The ship stopped dead, turned with indecent haste for a vessel that large, and with a screech of tortured engines, leapt forwards across the city skyline. Others followed, black and orange hulls soaring over the metropolis, illuminated by the blasts of their own cannon-fire.

"Get inside, get _inside!_" Espio shouted, scrabbling up from the floor of the gantry. Charmy and Cream lunged forwards, desperately hauling Amy towards the door of the chimneyed building.

It was not a good time to be outdoors. The Eggman Fleet had arrived.

* * *

**_Author Note_**

**_Uurgh. It's over. That chapter was _ridiculously _hard to write. The first half was OK; the second half took me two weeks and by my mind was even worse than my usual prosaic fare. I don't even know why I had such trouble with it. My muse just curled up and died, and so as a result an ostensibly Sonic fanfic turned into some sort of contemptible Call Of Duty crossover. Yrech._**

**_So as to avoid the confusion that addled Mr. Duran's mind; this chapter is obviously set at the time of Shadow's game, which is a number of Sonicverse years after the events of An Island Without A Name.  
_****_And if you don't know what Crush-40 is… well, I didn't either, until I had to go search Shadow cutscenes via Youtube in an effort to determine whether the Black Arms actually do have mouths or not (and they _don't_). Suffice it to say that Vector listening to Crush-40 may create an ff/IRL paradox that will _consume us all_._**

**_Anyway, it's a mystery fic, and mysteries abound! Why are Chaotix and 2/3rds of Team Rose even in Metropolis? What are the forbidden names of the city? Why is Espio smiling wryly? Precisely how does this chapter have any relation at all to the prologue? What the hell is the author doing? Has he been getting high off shampoo fumes and that's why none of it makes any sense?_**

**_STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT IN THE NEXT EXCITING INSTALLMENT _****_!one!!1!eleven!11!_**


	3. Caves Of Steel

They descended fast, and they descended in force. The Black Arms had been preparing for this day for a _long _time.

Metal City, Megalo, Westopolis; large, populous, _civilian_ cities, where the casualties would be maximised. They were wretched, human places, and their obliteration was of paramount eschatological necessity. It would be a holy bloodletting, the first step towards the salvation of the planet.

And then there was Metropolis.

Wretched? Most certainly. Human? Well, it had sprung from the mind of a man… but it was ruled by the soulless and peopled by the furred ones. Whether the city retained a shred of humanity or not, and thus whether it should be placed under interdiction, was an article of debate amongst the ecclesiarchy of the Black Comet. Out there, in the terrible blackness of a fifty-year orbit, they worried about such things. Along with the Unity of the Duality, and the Nature of the Vessel of the Flame.

The Black Arms had many gods. Some old, some new; and some less imaginary than others.  
Burnt offerings were left in the Temple of Mephiles, beseeching the sundered deity for guidance. But His portents were deceitful and hidden, and even His worshippers did not understand.  
The oracles of the sister temple, however, were less ambiguous. Never subtle nor cryptic were the reckonings of Iblis.

It was not a city of man, but it was a city in the image of man. And for that, Black Doom would do as the raving prophets commanded.  
Metropolis would burn.

* * *

The autoschool lay deserted. Clearplaz chairs were pushed back in various angles of disarray. Desktop digi-tablets glowed serenely, half-finished essays on display for anyone who happened to stumble across the empty classrooms.

Set into the front wall, a simulacrum of Eggman lectured from the telescreen; a pre-recorded image, oblivious to the fact that his student-captives were long since evacuated. Even in 2D, his red-black bulk seemed to leak out into the surroundings.

"…_precise nature differs depending on the specific frame of reference, and in some regions discontinuity never appeared to even occur! Nonetheless, the destruction of the dimensional research facility on Flicky's Island unquestionably catalysed the process. We can see a clear t-axial Gaussian distribution in empirically confirmed macro-scale overlay events, as shown here, with an uncertainty in the maxima of eleven days and a standard deviation of approximately one point three years…"_

As background graphs and histograms trooped past, two globes appeared beside the screen-Eggman. While his dictation progressed, the objects slowly moved towards each other until they touched, before seamlessly melding together in front of the Doctor's corpulent belly. What emerged was a crooked amalgam of the spheres, reminiscent of both but belonging to neither.

Robotnik snapped his fingers, and the agglomerate world vanished, to be replaced by pictures of various cityscapes. Cupped in his gloved hands, these pictures whirled around franticly; the Eggman selected two, tossing them to the corners of the screen. One showed a rather gritty, run-down environment, with ill-kempt concrete high-rises climbing up into the hazy air. The other was a gleaming citadel of metal and water, dominated by azure blue and polished silver.

"…_disparity we see between such settlements as Central City and Aquatic Capital is not, in general, an artefact of time-distended coagulation in their frame of reference. Such economic and technical inequality has a much simpler explanation: the product of incompetent social management by the alleged '_leaders'_ of the United Federation and the Guardian Units of Nation. Once again, we see demonstrated the unquestionable superiority of _my_ Eggman Empire in controlled distribution of resources and-"_

The image froze, a very three-dimensional throwing knife protruding from the forehead of the two-dimensional Robotnik.

"_Hey! _I was watching that!"

"No you weren't. And besides, you don't want to believe a word _he _says."

"You're just saying that because _you_ didn't understand it. If you were in the class, I bet they'd fail you straight away!"

Striding into the puddle of light cast by the telescreen, the purple reptile considered a suitably withering put-down for his buzzing companion. He nearly delivered it, too, before quashing the instinct at the last moment.  
Espio the chameleon had brought down whole units of Egg Pawns on the electric sky-streets of Hexaeco's Grand Metropolis. He had gazed up at the heartbreaking beauty of the boreal lights; and in the same second, watched his own blood _bounce _across the steel-hard rime of Aurora Icefield, frozen solid before it even hit the ground. He had experienced the absolute, timeless nothing of the Combi-Confiner; had felt the seconds abandon him as Eggman engaged the zero-tau fields. He had even tried human food, once; something called a 'sandwich'. It had made him incredibly sick.

But never, _ever_, had there been any greater challenge to his ninjutsu equanimity than Charmy Bee.

"Hello? We gonna smash it or what?" Charmy buzzed beside him, knocking at the bony crests on the chameleon's head when a response was not instantly forthcoming. Espio was instead concentrating on maintaining a neutral purple, even as his chromophoric scales tried their best to paint him irritated red.

"Yes," he managed at last, in a voice not quite as perfectly level as usual. "You grab that side, I'll get this end. Make sure you don't shock yourself."

Charmy scoffed as he took hold of the screen's edge, and put on a tone just as lecturing as the fat man they were trying to dislodge. "I _think _I know more about how to break a TV than you do, Mister Never-Watches-Anything-Espio. Maybe I should be telling _you _how to do it properly, because you _OW-OW-OW_!!"

There was a flash, and the frozen Robotnik abruptly winked out. Charmy, spinning and yelling and shaking his fingers, crashed straight into a row of propaganda posters.  
When the bee picked himself up, he very pointedly avoided meeting the chameleon's eye.  
It took a good deal of ninjutsu for Espio to keep his face straight.

With no small amount of exertion, the pair eventually managed to wrestle the blank display away from the classroom's wall. As the last of its power-lines snapped away, the piezoelectric substance of the screen collapsed on the floor in an untidy heap, revealing an intricate tangle of obscure machinery set into the fabric of the autoschool itself. And nestled unobtrusively at the centre of the technical smorgasbord: a small white box, advertising itself as "_Mark XIV Solarium-delta reactor_". The dark-red Eggman logo – the Doctor's own face, no less – was stamped prominently above the words; and golden light spilled out through tiny gaps in the device's welding.  
It was a feature they had grown quite well acquainted with, amidst the wreckage of Newtrogic High Zone's badniks.

"Bingo!" Charmy yelled, grinning gleefully at Espio.  
The chameleon had to agree with him.

* * *

"Charmy, don't open it yet! She'll-"

It wasn't really healing. There was no knitting back together of cuts and scrapes, no wooziness and disorientation, no blanching and fading of the bruises that hid beneath her scuffed fur. It didn't work like that. What the rings did – or _un_-did – was a great deal more complicated than mere biological curative.  
This point, however, was pretty much irrelevant to everyone who had ever felt the tingling, golden power course through their veins. And as damaged neurons phased back to their rightful place, it was _particularly_ irrelevant to one Amy Rose, who jerked into consciousness to find:

"Aaaaa! This thing's eating me! Get off me, let me go, you stupid alien, or I'll hit you so hard you'll… you'll wish I hadn't hit you so hard! Put me down, put me-"  
One of her flailing boots connected with a _crunch_, and the hedgehog found herself unceremoniously disgorged onto the ground. There was no Sonic to catch her this time, though.  
Amy landed on her side, rolled, and jumped to her feet in one smooth movement. There was no Sonic to catch her this time, but – as much as she hoped he'd do it anyway – Amy Rose could handle herself. Stardust Speedway was a long time ago.

And a long way away, apparently. As her red-and-white boots screeched to a halt, it was not the blemished teal concourse of that captive moon beneath their soles; rather the scrupulously scrubbed (but equally teal) metal of… somewhere… else.

All around the pink hedgehog, a cave of steel hummed with the clangour of busy machinery. Pistons thumped and pipes rattled; Amy's eyes widened as she followed their tangled networks, crawling across the ceiling like brassy pythons. On the right, metre-wide screws and bolts towered above her; half-glimpsed to the left, a vast meshwork dynamo thrummed out several hundred revolutions per minute, spinning off a scent of copper and ozone. The basso thrum of a thousand generators seeped up through inches of turquoise floor plating, imparting the ground a hyperactive vibration that set her tail on edge.

And right in front of her, a chameleon holding a white box was viewing his fallen comrades (one wheezing, one rolling around in hysterics) with something like bemusement.

"??"

Amy's tentative question didn't progress as far as actual _words, _but the implication was clear enough. Stepping over the crocodile and the bee, Espio walked towards her, apparently doing his best to look as peaceable as possible. The first time they'd met, she had smashed half of the chameleon's horn clean off his face. It was not an experience he seemed eager to repeat. Still, the hedgehog's eyes narrowed as he approached. She didn't have her mallet to hand this time.

"Metropolis Zone. The sub-factories, under the city." Espio explained, in a voice somewhat louder than seemed necessary. "You've been out for about two hours. And you didn't have to kick Vector quite that hard, you know. He's been carrying you for most of that time."

The crocodile in question was stalking towards them as Espio spoke, gold chain jangling, Amy's bootprint still stamped in the side of his chest. The hedgehog jumped as Vector leant over her, bringing his scaled muzzle right up against her tiny black nose.  
"Damn… brat… _mammal_," the lizard growled, regarding her angrily through slitted eyes. "Next time, I'll leave you to get shot at." Baring row after row of ferociously curved teeth, the detective added "…or maybe I _will _eat you, if you pull anything like that again."  
Amy shrank back, her fingers itching for a hammer that wasn't there. Or… anything. Just so she knew she _could_ whack these guys, and she and Cream could get away to –

"What have you guys done with Cream?" The hedgehog's voice sounded awfully small in her own ears. But certainly less scared than she felt, with Vector's fangs millimetres away from her face.

"We havn't done anything." the crocodile growled. "She's right behind you."

And so she was. The beige rabbit was watching the unfolding confrontation with her hands pressed over her mouth, a fearful expression painted across her face. Cheese perched at her feet, obliviously tapping the orange fabric of the bunny's shoes.  
With a wary glance back at the looming reptile, Amy sidestepped over to her friend, and grasped the rabbit's gloved hands with her own.

"Are you okay, Cream?" she whispered. Next to the whizzing dynamos, she could barely hear her own words; but Cream never failed to hear anything. "What happened? Where did _they _come from? They havn't tried to take Cheese again, have they?"

"He… he said he was going to eat us!" Cream squeaked, her chocolate eyes locked on the still-glowering Vector.

"He wouldn't get the chance," Amy told her, with more confidence than she felt. Odds on two small, unarmed mammals against three glorified mercenaries and a lot of throwing stars were not good. You didn't need tarot to tell you that.

"I… they… Amy, they said they'd help me find you after I got lost in the crowd… and… and then Mister Vector carried you, but… but then the factory set on fire and we had to go down because the sky went all shiny and blue…"

"Err… guys_,_" piped a voice from above them. Charmy Bee, having migrated back to the air once he stopped laughing, was pointing towards a pair of massive, cogwork gears, slowly turning in the near distance. "There's _baaaaaadniks_ coming this way! Maybe they know we stole school supplies?"

"How far, Charmy? Can we outpace them?" Vector barked.  
There was a _twang_-ing noise, followed by a _swish_-ing noise, and the helmeted bee dived to the floor, almost crashing into Cream and Cheese. Something curved and metallic slashed the air above Amy's quills, ruffling her head-spikes as it arced back in the direction of the cogs.

"Umm… no?" Charmy hazarded.

They were on them in seconds. Four of them, skittering across the sheet metal on segmented legs. Serrated mandibles clicked beneath bulbous, radar eyes, and the Zone's fluorescent lighting gleamed off viridian armour plating. The frontrunner raised a truncated arm, and snatched its boomeranging scythe-claw out of the air with a hydraulic whir.  
Mantisbots.  
The robot insects had been among the most feared badniks in the Doctor's arsenal, back when Sonic had torn through this city for the first time. And _that_ had not changed.

"Go!" Vector yelled, and the Mobians scattered in front of a barrage of razor forelimbs. Amy watched Cream leap up as a steel boomerang swiped right where the rabbit's legs had been; flapping her ears, the bunny soared into the air, holding Cheese in her hand with a determined expression on her face.

But what could Amy do?  
OK Rose… stay cool… can't marry Sonic if you're dead, can't marry Sonic if you're dead…

Amy threw herself backwards as one of the scythe-claws glanced off the floor nearby, tossing up a shower of sparks. It narrowly missed Vector on its rebound, the massive crocodile ducking only just in time. The badnik weapon slammed against the wall, embedding itself a whole foot into reinforced steel plate. Vector turned his duck into a roll, and careened into the mantisbot foolish enough to be straight in front of him.

The next boomerang wasn't so badly aimed, and Amy only saw it when the curved blade twanged to a halt in the pipe next to her, mere centimetres away from the hedgehog's head. Fortunately, the badnik in question didn't have the chance for a second shot, as its robotic thorax exploded in a nova of wires and rivulets. Cheese popped out of the wreckage, wearing a triumphant grin, _and _the mantis' head like a minature chao hat.

"Ha! That's why you don't mess with Team Rose!" Amy shouted. The third mantisbot was slashing at the air ineffectually, its armour pitted with coin-sized holes. A yellow, buzzing blur danced between the badnik's flailing scythes, stinging and stinging and occasionally kicking it in the head for good measure. Where was-

Something hard, something heavy, slammed into Amy's side, tackling her to the floor. She yelped as she crashed into the cold steel, but then she was kicking at it, scrabbling away across the vibrating floor. From nowhere, a gloved hand grabbed her shoulder; the white fabric terminating in… nothing?  
"Stay _down_!" Espio yelled at her. "That pipe-"  
The embedded scythe-claw blasted out of the brassy tube next to them, propelled by a rocket of high-pressure steam. The place Amy's head _had _been was engulfed in supercritical vapour; even down on the floor, the blowout sent her and the chameleon tumbling away from the pipe. Entangled, they rolled and rolled and rolled, and it was only several seconds after they bounced to a halt that Amy realised it was just her head still spinning, not the rest of her.

Forcing her dizzy eyes open one at a time, the pink hedgehog could vaguely make out Espio staggering to his feet. Her woozy guessing at his position was not helped by the fact that, except for his peach muzzle, the ninja had coloured himself the exact same shade of teal as the floor. There was a glint of metal, and something flew from between the chameleon's fingers. She could see his grin, though, as the throwing stars found their final target.

Amy grimaced as she tried to sit up. The battle was over, then. But "Oww… ah, my… head. Th- thanks, Espio," she managed. The half-visible figure completely ignored her, and simply walked away.

"Hey!" the hedgehog yelled, pounding her fists on the ground as annoyance took the place of disorientation. "What's your problem, Mister Ninja! A pretty girl's thanking to you here, and you just…" Amy trailed off as the chameleon continued to stroll off.  
The hedgehog frowned. She'd rolled to a stop next to the wreckage of the mantisbot Vector had smashed. Right now, a small bluebird was shaking the electrolyte out of its feathers, and looking around curiously to see where it had emerged. And right _next _to the bluebird:  
It was a heavy-looking thing, probably a robotic bone from the mantisbot's leg something. A long, metallic shaft; and, at the top, a big, grey, bashy-looking part, from a joint that hadn't been able to handle four hundred pounds of crocodile cannoning into robot.

Amy's exploratory fingers closed around the cybernetic femur.  
YES_. That_ would do _very_ nicely, thankyou Doctor Robotnik, you big fat smelly egg man you.

Cream and Charmy were surveying the wreckage from the air, as Espio waked through the debris towards the crocodile. All of a sudden, they didn't seem so big any more.  
Amy stood up, impromptu mallet in hand; took a deep breath, and:

"_HEY! Espio! _I'm talking to you here! I've taken that horn off once before, don't think I won't do it again, you stupid colour-changing…"

"Ha, hahahaha!!" Charmy cackled, somersaulting in the air beside her.  
"It's great, isn't it! Watch, watch, I'll do one better!" Cupping his hands around his mouth, Charmy yelled "_Hey! Espio! _You smell! You smell worse than those frogs we found in Lost Jungle! You remember? Those ones smelled so bad they killed all the plants? Yeah, you smell worse than _those_!"

The chameleon didn't even glower. He didn't give any indication of having heard Charmy at all, as he idly kicked aside dented badnik parts. Vector, on the other hand, smiled quite noticeably.

The bee chortled to himself, even as he wiped glistening oil off the top of his flight helmet. "And he can't tell what anyone's saying! _His_ stupid ears get all screwed up by the vibrations and he hasn't got a clue! This is the best factory _ever!_"

Amy planted her hands on the hips of her red dress, effortlessly diverting the (now useless) annoyance at Espio onto Charmy. "He's been deaf this whole time and you didn't think to tell me? And you think it's _funny_!?" she asked, glaring the insect with fiery disapproval. "Aren't you supposed to be Espio's friend?"

The bee's face dropped, a mixture of surprise and incomprehension. "Well… yeah. So? It's still funny!" he retorted, apparently failing to grasp that any incongruity existed between 'friend' and 'mocking their misfortune'. "And _you _were yelling at him as well, so -"

"Will you two please shut up and move?" Vector interrupted. "Maybe getting swarmed by reinforcements is your idea of fun, but it's not mine. We are leaving. _Now_." Pointing for Espio's benefit, the crocodile swished his tail and stamped off across the zone's ubiquitous green plating, in the direction of the giant dynamo.

"Wait! Where are you… where are we going!?" Amy shouted, jogging to catch up. Four pairs of footfalls and one hyperactive buzzing vied for audibility against the generator's electric whirring.

"_We_, the Chaotix Detective Agency, are getting out of this city, and _we _are taking Cream with us somewhere safe. _You, _Amy Rose, can do whatever you like. We'll mail you a bill for saving your life, I think it was…" Vector counted on his fingers, "Two, three, four… oh, call it five times. Plus carrying fees."

"How come _Cream_ doesn't have to pay a bill?" the hedgehog muttered sulkily.

"Because Cream didn't kick me in the ribs." Vector replied. But it came just a little too fast, and sounded a little too charitable. Even Charmy looked at his boss with a momentarily puzzled expression.

Amy growled, and clenched her fists to her side. She's see who'd pay who for what, when they got out of here… she told Sonic about all this stuff… stupid crocodile… nice to Cream for some reason… charge her for everything…

She followed Cream and Cheese, who followed Espio who followed Vector who followed Charmy, as the group trudged away from the badnik wreckage.

* * *

They seemed to be going all over the place. Charmy's route was confusing, but at least they didn't run into any more badniks. The polished green and brass of the factories gave way to grimy, dirty-looking duracrete walls, sporadic yellow/black danger markings and failing videoscreens set in the ceilings, blinking "_Hazard Vault: Containment Breached" _to no-one who understood. It smelt down here, of rot and metal. More than once, they came across obvious signs of battle in the increasingly gloomy and claustrophobic corridors; dried oil and green blood, spilt in roughly equal measure amidst the scorched craters of small-arms fire.

"Badnik _and _Black Arms," Espio commented, drawing his finger through one of the blackened markings, and glancing at Vector with an unreadable expression. Getting his hearing back after the factory hadn't really made the chameleon any more talkative, except when he was peering at combat wreckage. "What do they want down here?"

The crocodile muttered something Amy didn't hear, and then they were walking again. The pink hedgehog held Cream's hand, as the little rabbit's eyes skitted fearfully over the morbid detritus of sprockets and rubbish and dead Black Arms larvae that clogged the gutters of hallway after bleak, indistinguishable hallway... and it was as much for Amy's own comfort as Cream's.

They pressed on, into the tunnels. No-one, not even Vector, paid any attention to the crumpled, green-white sweet wrapper, caught underneath a melted crab-bot servomotor.


	4. On Ninjutsu

_**Author Note**_

_**HEALTH WARNING: This is basically a chapter constructed entirely from dialogue. **_**Even though **_**that didn't go so well last time. Frozen Nitrogen Corp would like to apologize for the glaring absence of blood-splattered violence, and we hope to resume normal service shortly.**_

* * *

She had slept in less comfortable places. Not many, but they were there.  
At least, that was what Amy tired to tell herself.

There had been weapons crates at the back of the room; orange cubes of synthwood, much harder and smoother than the real thing. Discarding the Doctor's clunky armaments in a heap on the ground, she and Cream had tugged out sheets of fluffy packaging, spreading the cottony stuff out on the ground as makeshift bedding.

But it was itchy, and it was cold, and it pulled at her fur whenever she moved. What was it, that Knuckles had said to her once? That it was as if some small part of Eggman always filtered down, infecting everything he created; _everything_, from this city itself, to something as simple as packaging material. Inanimate objects, but always designed with a certain cruelty, and a subtle malice towards living things.

A low rumble coursed its way through the walls. The fifth since she'd started counting. Even down here, the battle above still made itself heard.  
The pink hedgehog uncurled, quietly so as not to wake Cream. Her friend was dozing shallowly nearby, little arms wrapped defensively around Cheese. Amy stared up at the ceiling, her eyes tracing the tangled maze of tubes and conduits that weaved above them.

This 'hazard vault' place was _cold_. And damp. Coarse splotches dirty lichen pocked the naked duracrete walls, grey on grey. The only light sputtered dimly from a single cracked neon strip, welded into one corner just below the pipe-riddled ceiling. A shallow puddle of black, stagnant liquid lurked next to the doorway; Amy hoped it was oil, because water shouldn't smell like that.

She had slept in less comfortable places. Not many, but...  
…but Sonic had been there too.  
And no-one ever _wanted_ to go to sleep in Metropolis.

But at least she didn't have to live here.  
Oh, maybe some had wanted to at the start, if you were foolish enough to listen to the city's oldest residents, spinning unbelievable fairy stories about how it had been different, back at the very beginning. But certainly not now. The smog, the noise, the metal ground that hurt your paws while you walked, the… the _order _of the place, gridded streets and coridoors that branched and divided and subdivided with pitiless mathematical regularity. Mobians weren't _supposed _to live in a place like this. Not even _humans_ were supposed to live like this, and they could deal with urban landscapes far better than the Mobians' psychology would allow. Amy had lived in Station Square for a while herself… and that had been hard on the hedgehog, all the unnatural smells and rigid angles.  
But human cities were _nature_ _preserves_ next to what the Doctor had built.  
No-one, _no-one_ wanted to live in Metropolis.  
But they came here anyway, because there was nowhere else to go.

Sonic had told her that there used to be a forest on South Island. He used to go running there, to practice dodging between the trees instead of just tearing across the open fields of Green Hill Zone. The younger Amy had forgotten his exact words, too thrilled that he was actually _talking to her_ to soak up the detail. ('Don't pretend you're any different now', a cheeky voice at the back of her head piped up.)

But Sonic had described the place, anyway, about how it was one of his favorite spots on the Island, because it made him think up whole new ways how to run. He had a far-away look in his eyes, while he talked, and the cutest smile on his peach muzzle. Unstoppably sly when it came to the object of her affections, the pink hedgehog had seen a chance, and dived for it. "It sound's wonderful, Sonic," she'd said, putting her glove on top of his. "Could you… could you show it to me, sometime?"

Her hero hadn't moved his hand away, which was unusual. He didn't even look at her, with the kind of surprised embarrassment that he really should have gotten over already, even back then. Sonic had just kept staring at the horizon, with an unreadable look in his beautiful green eyes.

"He burned it down, Amy. He burned it down."

And _that _was why they all came here, to the Eggman's Metropolis. He had torn down the forests, drained the rivers, leveled the hills and poisoned the seas, where in their place came the Oil Oceans and the Iron Jungles that were the fat man's twisted concept of utilitarian beauty. Even afterwards, after Sonic defeated him time and again, the Doctor's vast machine-scapes still blighted those ecologies which Mobians had once called home. How many years had it been, since Scrap Brain Zone? But even now, on South Island, the rivers ran red with rust.

So they came here, because there was no other place to go. The remaining wildlands – or even the human cities, despite their faults – were simply too far away, separated from the South Island Archipelago by hundreds of kilometers of open ocean. And living properly in the human regions required _money_, which was another concept that Mobian semi-feral psychologies were (for the most part) rather ill-equipped to handle.

Metropolis was different. The city required no currency from its inhabitants, no payment for the windowless rooms, or the flavourless gruel that the feeding bays churned out three times a day. Obey the badniks, and attend the autoschools. That was all you had to do. So, after every one of the Doctor's campaigns, the refugees would come. Just a trickle, at first, but then more, and more, flowing bitterly into the city of the very man who had displaced them all; mammals and birds and insects and yes, even humans, after Station Square. And again, after falling chunks of moon had decimated their lands in the east.

But no-one ever _wanted_ to come to Metropolis.  
So why…

* * *

The chameleon sat, cross-legged, atop one of the synthwood boxes; palms together, eyes closed. He was meditating or something, she guessed. The hedgehog hoisted herself up to sit on one of the crates across from him. Behind them, a half-buzzing, half-snoring Charmy turned over in his sleep.  
"Your watch isn't for another hour yet, Rose," Espio remarked, without opening his eyes. He didn't move at all, while Amy just sat there, looking at her boots. The fact that he'd known it was her was… weird.

It wasn't that she thought she stood much of a chance of getting a straight answer out of the chameleon; but it was more likely than asking the crocodile, or Charmy. And she had to try, otherwise it would just keep spinning around in her head, wrecking whatever slim chance of rest she might have down here.

"Why are you here, Espio?" the hedgehog asked. "You, and Charmy, and Vector. Why were you in Metropolis, in the first place?"

_Now_ he opened his eyes. The chameleon didn't look at her; he merely stared ahead, fixated. Espio's scales seemed to turn just a touch lighter. But maybe it was just the lamp.  
"Client confidentiality," he said, quietly.  
It was what she'd thought he would say.

Amy tapped her heels against the box's unyielding sides. She didn't want to ask the next question. But she had to know. "You've taken a job from Eggman again, haven't you?" the hedgehog whispered.

Espio's eyes flickered to Vector's sleeping bulk, just momentarily. And then focused on Amy. He didn't speak, for what seemed like a long time. The only noise was the muted whirr of ventilator fans, spinning somewhere along the tunnel outside. The chameleon was usually so hard to read; but right now, the look in his golden eyes told her everything.

'_We never turn down work that pays'.  
_That was the Chaotix's motto.

"It's already finished." Espio admitted, when look on Amy's face left no question that she'd already figured it out.  
The hedgehog lowered her head, pink quills hanging dejectedly in the murky lamplight.

"How can you _do _that, Espio?"  
There wasn't much anger in the hedgehog's voice. If anything, she sounded… more than anything, she sounded _sorry_ for him.  
"When you… last time, back on the Egg Ray. I didn't understand how you could… how you could stand to set _him_ free. After everything he's done! Don't you _know?_ Don't you know about South Island? About the Little Planet? About Chaos? Don't you _remember?_ About everyone he's killed and… I… I don't understand how, when you could help us fight against -"

"Don't do this." Espio said. His voice was taut; his purple scales were definitely getting lighter.

"I mean, it's not just something that affects everyone else," Amy continued, fixing her emerald eyes to his. "He locked _you _up. Knuckles told us about the Combi-Com-thing, and… you might think you can hide, because you're a chameleon, but… the people and the places you care about… You had a zone you lived in once, right? Before you met Vector? Eggman wants to change it _all_, Espio. Everywhere. He'll cover it in metal and poison everything that's left, if he hasn't already. It'll be just like… just like… Sonic's forest…"

Her voice got very small, as she came to those final words. Somewhere Sonic had loved; and somewhere that she'd never, ever get to share with him, no matter what happened between them in the future.  
It was just one more beautiful thing that the Doctor had taken from the world, and from her. There were far, far too many to count.

Espio _had_ turned lighter. In fact, by now he was closer to white than purple. But he just sat there, meeting Amy's dejected gaze without blinking. Another muted explosion, more powerful than the previous ones, coursed through the room, rattling the pipes in the roof.  
Abrubtly, the chameleon leapt off his box. Espio's geckohold boots make a faint sticking noise against the duracrete, as the lizard wordlessly strode out of the door.

It took Amy a moment to realise what had just happened.  
"E- Espio?" the hedgehog stammered. He'd just… _left_?  
Clambering rather less elegantly down from her synthwood perch, Amy followed him out into the bleak linearity of the Hazard Vault tunnel.

"Espio! Where are you going!" she cried. But she couldn't even _see_ him. Straining her eyes, peering up and down the unnervingly straight expanses of walkway; there was no-one, ghost-white or magenta. The only movement was the fans, lazily cycling sterile air through the underground labyrinth. Particles of grit and debris drifted in the currents; something like a sweet wrapper sailed noiselessly towards the ventilator grilles.

What was she supposed to do? Try to find him? But that'd leave the others without a watch, so she'd have to wake up Vector, and spend time explaining… Oh, Espio! He'd asked her, he'd _asked _her not to do it! But she'd kept talking, and now...

Amy turned back through the doorway. And he was there.  
Espio was sat back on his box, painted the most eye-searing shade of snow-white she'd ever seen. The neon lamplight blazed off him, almost making him seem brighter than the very source of the illumination. A kunai knife twirled menacingly between the fingers of one hand. He was looking straight at her, a severe expression on his face.

"Where…? How…?"

"It has _nothing _to do with being a chameleon!" he snarled at her, harshly. The hedgehog had never heard him use such a tone before. "This stuff, these scales, they're not camouflage, like all you mammals assume. It's _emotion!_ They make us whatever colour we _feel_."

The lizard closed his eyes, and, slowly at first, the purple began to bleed back into him. When he reopened them tense seconds later, Espio's voice, and appearance, was as normal as always.  
"You didn't see me come back in, did you? Even though I looked like _that_. Being invisible is nothing to do with what species you are, Rose. It's all a matter of agility, and discipline."

Amy blinked. She was more than a little frightened of him, right now. He had been _angry, _when he was white. And that _couldn't _be true - that he could only change shade depending on what he was feeling… no-one could have locked their emotions down _that_ well, to be able to switch between them like Espio switched between colours. The amount of self-control…

"That's what ninjutsu is about, Rose," the chameleon told her calmly, as if he was following her thoughts. "Self-control. You don't have to be able to change colour to sneak past someone. You just have to make sure you're never stood in the places they look."

"Espio, I… what I said before…" Amy began. She still wasn't sure he could have cooled down that quickly, regardless of what he, and his scales, were saying.

"No, just… let me show you something, please," Espio interrupted, sliding off the crate and raising his arm towards her. "If you don't believe me about the camouflage, I'll prove it to you another way. See this? The kunai knife? You can do exactly the same thing with weapons as you can do with your own body. It's misdirection. You have to make sure your opponent can only see the things you _want_ them to see. Watch the knife carefully. Watch what I do with it."

Amy did what she was told. As Espio moved closer, she looked carefully at the dull steel, as Espio slid the hilt backwards in his palm, hiding pretty much all of the blade behind his gloved fingers, and –

Something tapped her lightly on the side of the head. Surprised, Amy swivelled her pupils to see: a clunky bundle of machinery, attached to a long, iron staff, attached to – held by – Espio's _other_ hand.  
It was her own badnik mallet.  
Although the chameleon remained his stoic purple, an undisguisable grin crinkled at the corner of his mouth.

"How did you… _where were you hiding that?!_" the hedgehog squeaked, disbelief plastered all over her face. Espio's grin broadened into a smile; the chameleon allowed a sliver of amused yellow to creep along his scales.

"Agility, and deception, Amy Rose. You were looking at the knife, even when I'd just _told _you that hiding weapons was all about misdirection. You didn't pay any attention to my other hand, did you? Or to what I was hiding behind me, ever since I came back in here?"

"But… there's _no way_ you could have hidden that from someone who's looking for it!" the hedgehog protested. "It's big, and heavy, and it's…"

"Misconceptions like _that _are what a ninja exploits," Espio informed her, wagging his finger a little like Sonic did. "Besides, you _weren't _looking for it, were you? And that's the whole point. If your enemy knows you're there, all the ninjutsu in the world won't save you. Don't _let_ them look anywhere important. Distract them. That's how you hide weapons; and that's how you hide yourself."

Amy shook her head, not quite able to believe, or follow, what the chameleon was claiming. First he'd been; angry? Guilty? And then he'd left, and somehow got back in, and now… this had to be some sort of magic. With weapons?  
"Why are you telling me all this?" the pink hedgehog asked.

"Back on the Egg Ray. When we freed the Doctor. It was…" he groped for words, helplessly. "We had to do it, Rose. He was our client. Even though he didn't pay us in the end. We took the job, so we had to finish the job. Because that's what Chaotix _IS_. We're a detective agency. It's not very often we like the people who hire us."

They were standing really close, right now. She could even make out the ever-shifting hues of tinted magenta and violet, constantly rippling through Espio's scales. It was strange… that no warmth came off of him, none at all. Reptiles were cold-blooded, she remembered.  
Espio suddenly seemed to realise how close they were, as well. He stepped back, almost apologetically, before continuing.

"You're right about him, though, Rose. Robotnik is…" he gestured all around them, at the soulless walls of the vault. "… he's something else. He's more than just a psychopath or a murderer; he's more than just evil. But if we break our code for him, then he's _beaten us_. Can you understand that? If he makes us give up on our motto, he's defeated Chaotix. He's defeated me, Charmy, Vector, and even…"

"Espio, you don't have to -"  
The ninja held up a hand, silencing her. He was still remarkably composed, given the content of his exposition.

"But we're not working for him _now_. Which means we're under no obligation to Eggman. Make no mistake, Rose; we hate him. Vector, and Charmy, and even me. We know what he's done to Mobius, even before he brought the other humans here. And that's why I'm telling you this. Like you said; I _can_ help you. I _will _help you."

He smiled cautiously at her. Amy processed it for a moment; and she broke out with the kind of heartfelt, beaming expression that she only ever bettered when Sonic was around.

"We've still got almost an hour until my watch is over," the chameleon declared, handing the makeshift hammer over. "So… shall I teach you some ninjutsu?"

* * *

_**Another boring Author Note**_

**_Amy's learning ninjutsu? Lolwut? It's almost as if I'm expecting her to gain some uncanny hammer-concealment and invisibility abilities that are never adequately explained in future games! And that'd be just _crazy.**

**_Post-emptively, for people not well-versed in the minutae of Sonic Heroes; the 'Egg Ray', or 'Egg Stingray' was, if Gigazubyte recalls correctly, the 'Egg Carrier' of that game, and the location of Sonic Heroes' Final Story, where Eggman had been held prisoner by Metal Sonic. If anyone can _confirm_ what that craft's name was, plz to be telling me plz. _**

**_Additionally, appropriate thanks must go to Taranea and STaR Productions, for brainstorming assistance.  
_****_And the reviewers. I loev U aLL._**


	5. A Parting Of Ways

**_Author Note_**

**_I know it took me more than 4 weeks. Consider it a gift, that you didn't have to put up with this abomination of prose until now. There's only so much you can do when your muse meets a fate... well, a fate quite similar to a certain someone in this chapter, in fact. See if you can guess which one it is. ;)_**

**_For your reference, when you get to it: "Zanshin" means some sort of Japanese-y martial-artsy total-body awareness type thing.  
Or so I have been informed._**

* * *

The night sky of Metropolis shone with war.

It was everywhere. The Black Arms' clouds glowed baleful red as otherworldly statics coursed through their billowing mists. Metropolis' defensive turrets spewed gobs of green-white plasma across the cityscape, chasing the violet ion-plumes of alien dropships. Black Volts grappled with Egg Drones in their thousands, the combatants swooping between towers and smokestacks, flashing like ephemeral stars as booming, sunburst explosions reflected off their metallic armours.

And as the Black Comet's orbit brought it within range, those weapons which had levelled Westopolis mere hours before turned their tender attentions upon the Doctor's city.  
A searing pillar of electric cyan bolted out of the clouds, skewering an Egg Fleet battleship like a particularly ugly butterfly on a collector's plate. In half a millisecond, the vessel's midsection was reduced to nothing more than liquid iron and smoke. Groundside, and three streets over, the concussive force of the laser cannonade was powerful enough to fracture the crystal lenses in an Eggrobo's eyes. Blinded, the android stumbled over shattered pavement slabs; straight into the path of a Giant's scimitar.

Half a world away, Iblis stirred, churning a Princess' dreams with fire and rage.

* * *

Charmy definitely knew exactly where they were.  
Probably. Maybe.  
Charmy probably definitely knew exactly where they maybe were.

For the hundredth time, the insect pushed his drooping antennae out of his eyes. He was _booooooored_. Everywhere was all the same: concrete and grey and concrete and grey, and it all started to blur together after so many hours. He was _sure _they had be back above ground level by now… but in Metropolis, you could never tell.  
At least Newtrogic High Zone had been _colourful_. Charmy wasn't stupid or suicidal enough to _wish_ for a badnik patrol around the next corner… but…  
But there was a little voice, nagging at the back of his mind. That something wasn't right here. That there should be _something _in their way…

Amy and Espio weren't helping the bee's mood, either. Four pairs of footfalls behind him kept dropping to two, as the pair practiced that silent, sliding walk the chameleon could do. It made Charmy jumpy. He wished Vector would tell 'em to stop it, but the boss was probably too busy asking Cream about her mom's favourite colour, or something.

Which meant that, when the ongoing battle above Metropolis finally caught up with them, the insect was the first one to notice.  
"Hey, Vector, what's that rumbling-"  
And then everything happened at once. The rest of Charmy's sentence was violently cut off as Espio tackled his junior partner out of the air. Blazing alarms and crimson lighting exploded all around them, assaulting the Mobians' senses with a barrage of noise specifically designed to root them to the spot for the two point one seconds it took the bulkheads to slam closed.

The detectives hit the ground rolling. Charmy felt his exoskeleton _crunch_ as they bounced across the unforgiving floor; he glimpsed, for a fraction of a second, the spiked underside of a steel barrier descending towards them…  
And then Vector, sliding under the gap on his belly, those same metal points raking the croc's tail as it slithered through the final inch of free space –  
The bee's head whacked against something; whether it was the floor or the wall, he couldn't tell, but it was only Charmy's flight helmet that saved him from terminal concussion. Blurry images swam before his eyes, strobing blood-red in the epileptic illumination.  
"_They've closed down the whole passage_!" someone shouted, voice barely audiable above the raging klaxons.  
"_Amy and Cream_?  
"_They were behind me! They must still be on the other side!_"  
"_We have to-_"  
At which point, the laser-blasted halves of an Egg Fleet battleship hit the complex.

It was like being in the middle of an avalanche. Charmy had just been levering himself up when the entire building jerked, throwing the Chaotix sideways against the wall. From the levels above them, a screech of tortured metal and crumbling concrete; it started louder than the alarms, and only got _worse_. Charmy clamped his hands over his ears, flattening himself into a corner as the concerto of impact raged all about them. The klaxons suddenly died with an abrupt electronic whistle, and the lights flickered, briefly plunging their section of corridor into total darkness. Another violent jolt threw the insect against the floor; the ground seemed to be tipping sideways…  
Something extraordinarily heavy hit him on the side of his head, knocking what few rings the insect had left right out of him. And the world turned off.

* * *

Mimicking the motion of the chameleon's shoes, Amy's red boots slid along the grainy concrete floor. Movement didn't have to be _silent_, Espio had told her; if you could blend the sounds you made into those already around you. That meant pacing your steps in rhythm with the slow cycling of the fans – something the hedgehog was finding a lot easier said than done.

"You're still putting too much pressure on your left", the chameleon told her, sidling along beside Amy's whisper footsteps. "Look; Cream can still hear you. Her ears are twitching every time you push forwards."  
Amy glanced over her shoulder irrritatedly, just in time to see the beige rabbit fold her foolproof ears down behind her back. Cream's white-furred muzzle failed miserably at disguising the blush that was rising on her cheeks.

"No, I… it wasn't… she's not… I - I think Amy's getting better, Mister Espio…"

At the front of the group, Charmy piped up "Hey, Vector, what's that rumbling-"

Espio vanished in a blur of purple scales, as the corridor descended into siren-filled chaos. The hedgehog, too, was moving in less than an instant. While she might not have mastered _zanshin_ like the chameleon, Amy's senses were honed by half a lifetime of seeing Sonic destroy killer robots in less time than it had taken her younger self to _blink_. Being madly in love with the fastest thing alive wasn't a spectator sport. You needed lightning reflexes just to _watch _him.  
Amy darted towards Cream, skidding under the deadly edge of another metallic barricade with less than a hair's breadth to spare. The rabbit was rooted to the spot, gloved hands clamped down hard over her ears. She was helpless in a situation like this; hypersensitive hearing did not mix well with screaming klaxons.  
But in front of the Mobians, as well as behind, more bulkheads were crashing closed, sealing off the entire length of their passage. Amy had merely exchanged one prison for another. Why would Metropolis shut down the whole section? It –

The Hazard Vault was an immense complex, and robustly built, even in the outer, surface levels, which Charmy had indeed managed to lead them to. It had not, however, been designed to withstand a battleship falling on top it.

Amy could do nothing but try to shield the two of them from a torrent of steel and mortar, as the wall in front of them collapsed. An entire wing of the Vault's surface annex was pulverized in seconds, twisted rubble borne unstoppably down the building's flank by the sundered carcass of the ruined battleship. And even here, hundreds of meters away from the impact site itself, the violence of the crash proved sufficient to crumble the superstructure's outer ramparts. Along the ceiling, pipes cracked and burst, dousing jet-black petroleum into the passageway as chunks of masonry hurled themselves from the roof to the floor, or maybe vice-versa. Debris pelted them mercilessly. Cream and Amy were both knocked to the ground as the metal plating beneath them buckled; blood and fuel oil washed between the hedgehog's teeth as she desperately held onto her friend, and vainly tried to keep the acid petroleum out of her lungs.

A night skyline, glimpsed through flurries of falling masonry. They must have been at least ten stories up; through a haze of pain and oil, Amy glimpsed broken domes of habitation complexes through the flying debris, and gothic battlements of defensive fortresses, silhouetted against the crimson clouds. The Cathedral of Transformation still stood, looming battered but unbroken over the centre of the city, black smoke belching from a thousand ports of the Robotnik-shaped citadel, as roboticization chambers laboured unceasingly within its depths.  
She blinked. It was still there. But…  
…there was stuff in her eyes…

Behind the hedgehog, Cheese slipped in Cream's grip when another tremor shook the building. Amy heard her friend yell something as the blue creature tumbled free, rolling across the fractured floor towards the edge of the concrete precipice.

And over.

"_Cheese_!" Amy and Cream cried together, as their azure mascot spiraled away into the blackness. Even discounting those tiny pink wings on the creatures' backs, chaoes seemed to possess only a shaky relationship with gravity; Cheese tumbled erratically through the smoke-filled air, buffeted by vicious thermals from the fires that roared at street-level.  
Glancing sideways, through quills dripping with petrol, Amy watched the look creeping across Cream's face, abject horror mixing with… something else? The rabbit's wide eyes were fixed on Cheese, as the chao spiraled over soot-stained walls of the adjacent building. Her ears twitched…

"Cream, wait!" Amy yelled, kerosene stinging at the back of her throat. But the rabbit staggered over wrecked vestiges of the outer wall without even glancing back, her orange shoes skating on the viscous oil that coated everything. Amy's soaking gloves made another attempt at wiping the liquid out of her lashes; she inched her eyes open again just in time to watch Cream flapping her ears weakly, as the rabbit half-leapt, half-fell away from the ruined façade of the Vault, into those same thermals that had borne Cheese away.

The hedgehog stumbled helplessly. She couldn't… think straight, and the walls were blurry. Wiping her face again as liquid trickled into her eyes, Amy cast around helplessly for some means to pursue the reckless bunny. She could make out the Chaotix, now, through a gap torn in the metal bulkhead.  
…What were they doing all the way over there? Charmy and Espio were down, but Vector was on his feet. He was pointing at her. Was he saying something? She wished Sonic was here. He'd…  
A spring. It wasn't much; just a warped coil of steel, some part from the ventilation systems from the upper floor, that had collapsed into her corridor. But it would have to serve. Amy wasn't going to lose Cream. Not here. She wasn't… going to…

"Don't be an idiot, hedgehog!" she heard Vector snarl. The crocodile was picking his way across the broken rubble, his eyes fixed on the mallet that Amy had raised above the spring. "You'll never make -"

Amy blinked that… stuff out of her eyes again. It was redder than the oil on the floor. Her head was spinning…

She brought the hammer down.

* * *

She was a good newt.  
Wasn't she a good newt?  
She hadn't been at first, she knew, and she was sorry, sincerely. She had been small, as a larvae; much smaller than her sisters, and they had even named her for it. Zuttenza, 'Little Star'. It was a pretty name, she thought, despite its origins.  
"There is evil in your blood, Zuttenza," the vat-priests had scolded her time and again, remonstrating her unsatisfactory growth. Her sisters had teased her, as they crawled over the cold walls of cometary basalt, and she had entertained in her mind unkind thoughts about them. Even though, as she knew now, it had been _her_ who had been in the wrong. She had been deficient; and deficiency was sin. It didn't matter whether or not it was something you could change.

But she had eventually found solace, in scripture. Like her sisters, she had learned, memorizing the religious catechisms by rote under the crimson light of the comet's glowfruits. The Prophet's words had comforted her, in those times when she had felt most alone; amazing words, of the Black Arm's divine mission; of a paradise beyond the walls of the Comet, beyond the Void – a paradise which would be theirs, if their faith was strong enough.  
She was a good newt. She had believed it.

She had believed it through good times and bad. Zuttenza had recited Doom's Canticle under her breath, to quell the fear that first time she stood on the outer surface of the Comet, and watched the stars spiraling crazily outside the clearplaz window of her suit visor.  
She had believed it the first time she killed another creature, a berserk wurm that had tunneled into the training warrens. Compound eyes blinded with tears, Zuttenza had struck the flailing beast with a broken stalactite; and she hadn't been able to stop shaking for two hours, begging the Prophet for forgiveness over and over and over until her sisters managed to convince her that it was not a mortal sin, and everything was going to be alright.  
She had… she had been too scared to really believe much of anything, when an energy-gun was pressed into her hand, and harsh orders directed her onto a waiting dropship. The fact that is was really happening, _now_; that it was _her _generation, _her _brood, who were to be the sword of the Prophet, and bring about the Ritual of Prosperity, it… it seemed too surreal. Still, she had held to her faith. She had done as the Gods commanded, through their instrument, His Most Holy Eminence, the Prophet Black Doom. She had taken the weapon. And she had got on the ship.

See?  
She was a good newt.  
Wasn't she a good newt?  
_So why was this happening to her?_

The castle ramparts were wreathed in caustic, cloying smoke. It would have overwhelmed her nostrils, if she _had_ any; but the Black Arms breathed through their skin, so it was much, much worse: an all-body feeling of stinging suffocation. Blue fires flickered in braziers, all around her, coating Zuttenza's ebon membranes with choking soot. Her pistol felt like a lead weight in the oppressive gravity, clutched desperately in her three-fingered hand; again and again, Zuttenza fired behind her as she ran, shooting waves of violet luminescence into the fog. The air seethed with pheromones: panic, and agony, and a chemical trace of _terror _so thick that it sucked all thoughts of training and discipline out of her mind like argon out of an open airlock.

Her feet skidded on the slick jet stones of this monstrous structure, as Zuttenza desperately fled. She didn't want to accept what it was, that prowled through the mist behind her; it had been there, and gone, in an instant, too fast to have any real hope of following. One moment, the brood had all been there, lying in ambush for another detachment of the soulless; the next, Zuttenza's left arm, and the side of her face, had been doused with something. Something green. It had taken her a full second to realize that it was _blood_. And it wasn't hers.  
The things she had heard, through the smoke; by the Prophet, the things it had _done_, to her own sisters, who were running beside her one minute, and the next…

She couldn't see any of them, any more. Her _entire _brood… there… there must be _someone_ else, somewhere?! Right? That thing, that impossible monster, that _abomination_; had it gotten them all? The fog was thinning, as she sprinted onwards. There was something ahead of her, hazily realized in a mind awash with fear: a pink silhouette, in the swirling gloom; was -

One more gunshot was nothing; a single note the background music of the city, those octaves of war that played through every corner of embattled Metropolis. But it was the loudest sound Zuttenza would hear, for the extremely short remainder of her life.  
She fell.

* * *

"Cream? _Cream!?_"  
The hedgehog's boots drummed out a frantic rhythm on the dark stone slabs, as she jogged along the shrouded battlements.

"Cream! Where are you?!"  
Her quills were back in place, the tears in her dress and gloves (and forehead) patched up as if they had never been there at all. Rings would do that to you - even if you just rolled into them by accident, after landing with near-fatal force on the top of the castle walls. Her injuries were gone, but replaced with a kind of horrible clarity, as Amy became more and more aware of the true nature of her situation.

"Cheese?"  
She was in the middle of a battle. In the middle of the Doctor's city. Alone.

"Cream, _please_, be here somewhere…"  
Would the rabbit even be able to hear her shouting? If anyone could, it was Cream, but without knowing which direction to search in, how would the hedgehog ever–

Amy almost jumped out of her pelt as a single gunshot rang across the parapet.

Lurching sideways, she narrowly dodged out of the way as a Black Arms trooper crashed to the floor, right where the hedgehog had been standing half a second ago. Amy landed on the balls of her feet, ready to dive one way or the other if another attack was coming…

The alien just lay there. It was a mess. The vaguely reptilian creature was splattered all over with green ichor, its black and red skin hardly visible under all the grime and blood. The air smelled of ozone and char. Amy knew that mix all too well; it was the scent of an Eggman laser that had found its target. Which is why her eyes were fixed not on the fallen invader, but on the one who had shot it.

Slow, regular footsteps clinked against the stones of the walkway, hoverskates' metallic treads tapping against the substance of the Doctor's fortress.

_Him.  
A ghost_.

Amy hadn't known _what _to think, on the Egg Ray, when she had seen him again for the first time. And now, all those questions came flooding back. _How _was he still here, on Mobius? She had _watched_ him die, outside the ARK. He… he _couldn't _be here. What _was _he?  
Black spines coalesced out of the swirling haze; crooked, organic blades trimmed in red, curving upwards in a parody of hedgehog-ness. It didn't make any _sense_… How could he have survived?  
The fight against Metal. That was when these questions had first demanded answers of her; answers that no-one seemed to have. But Sonic had trusted him, back then; _whatever _he was, Sonic had trusted him. And she trusted Sonic - more than she trusted anything in the world.

So she called out.  
"Oh, Shadow, I'm so glad you're here; Cream wandered off into this weird-looking castle, and she hasn't come back out! Would you help me… look for… her…"

The hedgehog drew closer. There was a very large gun in his hand; it was fixed on the fallen alien, as were his crimson eyes. Shadow didn't even glance at Amy. As he drew level, he simply planted a gloved hand on her chest. And _pushed_.  
There was chaos control behind it. Amy Rose hit the floor with a bone-jarring thump, skidding across the stones until her back slammed into the low wall of the battlements.

Wha-

And so it was through a lens of breathless shock that Amy simply watched, as Shadow moved in on the collapsed Black Arms. It was moving now, just barely; the alien was trying to drag itself towards its weapon, dropped on the flagstones when it had almost fallen on Amy. And as the trooper extended its three-fingered hand, reaching for the pistol…  
Shadow shot it in the arm.

Meters away, the sizzle of burning flesh still reached Amy's ears above the distant clamor of warfare. The Black Arms didn't have mouths; but the alien arched its back horrifically, contorting itself on the green-stained floor. Anyone could see that it was screaming.

"You tried to run from me, didn't you?" Shadow asked. His voice was absolutely cold, utterly lacking in even a trace of pity. "From me? Do you _know _who I am? Do you? Do you know what being the Ultimate Lifeform _means_?"  
There was only one other person Amy had ever heard talk with a voice like that. And they were in his city.

There was a pause, during which Shadow's ears lowered, just slightly, black triangles flattening back against his head in irritation. The hedgehog snarled, tossing his Eggman weapon over the edge of the parapet. There was something around him, when he turned back to the stricken trooper; a faint, crimson light, that seemed to glow out of the hedgehog's body itself. It built, and built, as Shadow's eyes narrowed to ruby slits; and with a grotesque, crunching sound, the alien's leg just – _snapped_.

"_TELL ME WHO I AM!" _Shadow roared.  
What was he...  
It… it wasn't rhetorical? He was actually _asking_?  
But they… they didn't have mouths, so how could it tell him anyth-

Shadow's fur pulsed red once again. There was another sickening, fleshy noise, and the alien very abruptly stopped moving. Its head lolled at an impossible angle, sightless eyes coming to rest right where Amy sat. The creature was very, very dead.

And the Ultimate Lifeform didn't spare it a second glance. Instead, he simply picked up the energy pistol which the alien had been so desperately reaching for. Idly glancing at the scarcely-comprehensible charge readout, the hedgehog tested it in his hands, casually attempting to figure out the best way to hold a gun designed for three alien fingers.

All the while, green ichor oozed out of the broken Black Arms, tracing its way through the grooves in the stonework. Amy just sat there, staring up at Shadow in undisguised horror.

And then, at last, the Ultimate Lifeform's attention turned to her. And her alone.  
He smiled.  
The expression never reached his eyes.


	6. The Bad Man

**_Author Note_**

**_BEFORE you flame me, I remind you he has _crippling amnesia all the way through the game, _and so he should neither be expected to act entirely as normal, nor should other people be expected to REact entirely as normal towards him._**

**_That is all._**

* * *

The moon gleamed over the hundred spires of Cryptic Castle, its otherworldly light undiminished by the pall of crimson mist which smothered the city. Mobius' greatest satellite, at its closest approach, was a breathtaking sight, dominating the sky with a brilliant crescent of ochre and silver. The Broken Moon was up there too, somewhere; trailing its fragments like pale tears.

Warm gusts carried the scent of oil and scorched stone across the narrow parapet, as the black hedgehog walked towards her. Moonlight rippled silkily through Shadow's ebon fur, as his red eyes held Amy's. He was still smiling at her; that same strange, haunting expression. The pink hedgehog's heart beat wildly, almost… almost like it did when Sonic was nearby.  
But, at the same time, it was horribly different. Not excitement, or love, that set the blood pounding in her ears. It was fear that pulsed through her.  
Wasn't it?

Zuttenza's sightless eyes stared up at the hedgehogs, as Shadow's menacing approach suddenly faltered. He planted his feet. Stared at her through narrowed eyes.  
"You…" he breathed, his brow creasing in doubtful recognition.  
"With the cat, and the rabbit… on the Egg Ray. What are you d-"

The rest of the hedgehog's question found itself abruptly cut off, as the vehemence of battle ploughed head-first into their brief moment of moonlit calm. On the far side of the parapet, a hellish garden of red and orange burst into explosive bloom, fireball blossoms smashing the black stone walls as distant cannons strafed the castle in furious abandon. Scorching light and thunder shoved aside the selunite opalescence with all the subtlety of a howitzer barrage.

Which, indeed, is precisely what it _was_. As the murderous volley raced towards them, Amy still retained the presence of mind to get up and _run_.

* * *

Vector had known there was something wrong.  
He had known before the ship crashed, before the blast doors _proved _his hunch by demonstrating that they weren't all broken. The detective had really hoped he'd been wrong, this time.  
But as no such luck.  
He'd really hoped they'd find some rings, too before… before they ran across something like this. That was rings for you, though. You'd find three hundred of them at once just _hanging _around in the air… but they were never anywhere to be seen when you _really_ needed them.

Unlike rings, of course, there were sensors everywhere in Metropolis. Which was the puzzle that worried him. They couldn't have escaped the machine city's notice for this long; _and _the whole place was supposed to be under lockdown anyway. But how many sealed corridors had they come up against, before they were forcibly lowered to shore up the complex for impact? All the way from the autoschool, the factories, the vault…  
_None_.  
And _that_ didn't make sense. Which was why it was important. Eggman would have closed _everything _down, from the start of the battle, to stop the alien's movements. The passageways shouldn't have been open at all. They _shouldn't _have been able to get this far.

The bee had noticed it too; Vector could tell, from the way Charmy glanced suspiciously at the metal doorframes as they passed beneath them, one by one; worried eyes under cracked goggles, as if he expected the doors to slice down right on top of them, without warning or preamble. The insect's wings beat just a little faster, over those thresholds; striped antennae twitching in agitation above his battered flight helmet. It was not, the crocodile supposed, an entirely unfounded fear.

Vector and Espio hadn't fared any better than Charmy in the aftermath of the falling battleship. The croc's back was a painful mess of scrapes and bruises; and his ears were _still_ ringing even now, over an hour later. Next to him, Espio's face remained as level as always; but murky ribbons of blue and green chased across the chameleon's injured scales, a sure sign that the ninja was not in the best of conditions.

These were all reasons why Vector had been more than tempted to simply push on, and leave Amy and Cream to whatever horrible fate they were stupid enough to pursue. If the mammals wanted to get themselves killed _that _much, that they'd go running back into the warzone…  
Well, the crocodile didn't intend to let Chaotix join them as casualties.

_On the other hand…__  
_You couldn't bill a dead hedgehog.  
And it was going to be quite a _large _bill.

So they had doubled back, after the crash, returning to the prison-warehouse of the Hazard Vault as Charmy tried to find them a route inside that cryptic castle.  
It was the smell, that had led them to _this_ tunnel. A sulfurous reek that defeated the efforts of the venting systems, even two corridors over. Vector almost wished he'd just ignored it.

Ten meters away, it was just another corridor. The same blank, sterile walls as always, the same recessed cell doors, armored and unmarked, soullessly repeated through the vast concrete foundations of the Doctor's city. The same swish of fans, the same scent of scrubbed air...  
And then this.

Against the grey of the passage walls, the black/yellow hazard chevrons began, just in front of the Chaotix's boots, to relinquish their monopoly as the Vault's sole source of colour. It only came in specs, at first; casual droplets scattered in haphazard curves across the metal surfaces. Further along, on the walls: sweeping arcs trailed vertical lines of viscous green. Gravity tugged at the liquid redecoration; dragging the fluid into trickling barcodes, ichor on concrete.

"Five," Espio muttered quietly. He was counting, detective instincts guiding his reluctant eyes to trace across the scene. Turquoise patterns continued to squirm within the chameleon's cells, nauseous shades which belied the equanimity in the ninja's voice. Not that Vector _needed_ any help to feel nauseous. Not here.

"…Six." Espio nodded finally, with a fractional bob of his horn. "Maybe seven. I don't know how many larvae."

No-one replied. Not even the ventilators made a sound. Their mechanisms had shorted, drenched and clogged by the slick of pulverized biology. Blood would have dripped from the motionless fan-blades, Vector thought; an irregular _drop, drop, drop_ of viridian gore. It had dried, now. Must've happened hours ago.

Badniks didn't do this. Badniks were efficient. They shot you, and they moved on. This…  
They had been Black Arms. Until recently.  
Something had _torn them apart_. Vector didn't know how Espio had arrived at his count. It was hard to tell where one body ended and the next began.

"No footprints, boss," Charmy remarked, buzzing fitfully over the carnage like an indecisive carrion fly. Doing his job.  
"Whoever pasted these guys didn't walk out of here."  
That was what you had to do, what you learned to do, as a detective. When you were faced with… something like this. Just _do the job_. Focus on the clues, and try, try very hard, not to think about what it was you were looking at.

"It's not robots," Espio told the insect, articulating the same line of thought as Vector had followed a moment ago. "Metropolis garrison aren't this messy." The chameleon nudged some mangled remnant of an alien limb with his boot, as if to illustrate the point.

"Who else is around to do somethin' like this?" the bee countered. Charmy hovered underneath the corridor's central lightstrip, blood-splattered illumination tubes painting him the same sickly hue as the puddled floor. "Besides the Egg Drones, what's going to be flying around down here?"

"They didn't have to fly," the ninja responded, thoughtfully. "They just had to walk away without touching the floor."

"What difference does it-"

"They didn't have to walk away _at all_." Vector interrupted.  
The boss was stood, arms folded, staring across the slaughter as his teammates turned back to face him. Crocodilian teeth glowed a dull green, reflecting the tinted light of the overhead strips.  
With a nudge of his snout, Vector pointed them towards the cell door on the left. Its locking mechanisms had been shot out.

"The Arms were trying to break something out of the – boss, _wait!_" Charmy exclaimed, as Vector took a step towards the damaged portal, his boots squelching atop the carpet of viscera. A lone candy wrapper adhered to the crocodile's treads, glued there by the residue of carnage.

"Boss, we don't… we don't really want to go in there, do we? If it's still inside, whatever did this…" The bee's objection had started off scared, but it dwindled to nothing under the reptile's withering gaze. The surroundings did not put Vector in the best mood for discussion.

"You'd rather leave it to creep up behind us, would you?" the boss asked. Without waiting for a response from either Charmy or Espio, Vector turned, and grabbed the edge of the door. And _pulled_.

* * *

The badniks had been pinned down; confined within the circular tower by overwhelming numbers of Black Arms forces. Eggman's networks were in tatters, the alien's static clouds reducing Metropolis' tactical comlines to nothing more than a roar of white noise at the back of the robot's processors. The _system _was compromised, Black Doom's algorithms storming the firewalls of Mad Matrix itself.

Badniks couldn't feel anything, and they certainly couldn't feel fear. The Black Arms were nothing to them but numbers, statistics; data points at the terminal end of calculated bullet trajectories. The splash of plasma on metal was just another noise. The loss of a motion sensor, a servoactutator, a steel limb – it didn't faze them.  
Rebalance. Recalculate. Fire.  
They couldn't feel fear…  
But that _absence, _in the depths of their silicon minds... where the Creator's orders _should _have been...

Two sets of eyes ran across this rapid exchanging of fire, even as their owners sprinted along the battlements overhead. The pair on the left bore a look of grim determination, crimson irises focusing on those giant, alien artillery; the same guns that had chased them from the last parapet, in a hail of thunder and fire. The pair on the right looked scared, circles of frightened jade casting cautious glances not so much at the ongoing skirmish, but rather towards that other observer.

He didn't know who she was. And Amy suspected this was the only reason she was still alive.  
Oh, Shadow _recognised_ her; that was for sure. He had seen the pink hedgehog, just as she had seen this impossible ghost of _him_, during the battle against Metal Overlord. But the way his words felt, those few times he said anything at all… Shadow spoke like a creature who didn't know _what_ he truly remembered.

Cobalt fires danced inside black iron braziers, as the hedgehogs raced above the outer walls. Amy's feet weaved between the battlefield detritus of rubble and twisted badnik parts, struggling to keep pace with Shadow's hoverskates as they carried him effortlessly above the fragmented wreckage.  
She truly wasn't sure that it was safer to look for Cream _with_ Shadow than it was to search for her friend as far away from him as possible. _Was_ this really Shadow? And if he knew that she'd been there, on the ARK… if he thought she knew something about his past, like that alien… Amy shivered, her eyes still trained on the black hedgehog's outline. She could still hear that _crunching_ noise in her mind, when that blood-red aura had broken the Black Arm's neck.

Amy Rose was lost, one hedgehog running blindly through the clockwork lair of a monster more terrible than any tarot demon. But Shadow; although he looked as though he knew exactly where he was going… the Ultimate Lifeform was lost too. Far moreso than her. It wasn't just that Shadow didn't know who she was.  
He didn't know who _he_ was.  
She couldn't just leave him here.

They were circling round, bolting down the coiled levels of a tower staircase eight steps at a time. Now he had something in his sights, something to focus on _smashing_; Shadow didn't even glance backwards. He showed no interest in pausing, no interest in investigating the hedgehog girl who sprinted along at his flashing heels.

Just like Sonic.  
And he was so _fast_.

As they burst out of the foot of the staircase, twin pink and black blurs - Shadow didn't even _cross_ the intervening spaces, spinning and punching and firing through the invader's barricade. Two Black Arms were thrown backwards, somersaulting through the air as Shadow's roundhouse kick knocked them through a solid wall of black stone. Before the aliens even landed, the hedgehog was gone, winking out of existence in a flash of green light. He reappeared, _fourty feet _above her, to smash a Black Volt in the face with the butt of his gun, before vanishing again as a volley of pink energy rippled through the space Shadow had just occupied. A riot of gunfire from inside the badnik's tower left little doubt as to where he'd gone.

Having lost sight of the other hedgehog, Amy's sprinting steps carried her into the hulking shadow of a Black Arms Giant. The mountain of blackened muscle began to turn towards her – but not nearly fast enough, as Amy delivered the full momentum of her sideways speed into the creature through the soles of her boots. Even as the giant toppled, the pink hedgehog sprung off its massive chest, somersaulting through the crackling air to land forcibly on the alien's shoulder. Amy was too light to really injure the creature through its oversized muscles; it was gravity that did the work for her, as the Black Arms' chitinous skull bashed into the stone battlements on its way down.

One down, only another half a squadron to go-  
_Cream_.  
A ball of dirty beige fur chicaned out from behind the wall Shadow had smashed, careening full-tilt into the side of an alien soldier. The impact knocked both of them sprawling; unfortunately for Cream, the Black Arm seemed to come out of it slightly _better_ of the two. The little rabbit's velour pelt did _not_ make for effective spin-dashing.

Amy was moving in half an instant, a pink flash in the seething pandemonium, to wrench her stunned friend up from the bullet-strewn floor. Where Cream had landed, enemy fire ate through the floor like Sonic through chilli dogs. With her gloves full of rabbit, Amy had no way to hammer a path through the fighting; which meant plan B.  
The two mammals crashed through a pile of synthwood crates, stacked up next to the staircase from which Shadow and Amy had first emerged. Pursuing gunshots tore into the boxes, setting alight the same vindictive packaging that had destroyed Amy's sleep down in the Vault. And as the flames took hold, the ammunition inside burned too.

Amy darted behind the stone shield of the stairway as fuel cells within the flaming weaponry caught alight. The roaring detonation knocked her off her feet, even with seven feet of black granite between the hedgehog and the parapet. She held on to Cream as strongly as she would have held onto Sonic, even as they smacked concussively against the floor. Amy wasn't going to lose her again.

Scrambling back up on bruised knees, the hedgehog gasped; not so much at the lancing pain in her legs, but because her eyes finally had the chance to take in Cream.  
The rabbit looked _terrible_. Her fur was matted with greasy, red-black liquid… no, it… thank goodness, it wasn't blood. It was that stuff she'd seen oozing out of the crimson glowfruits, as they'd sprinted across the castle… in retrospect, maybe it would have been better if it _was_ blood. Amy didn't know if the glowfruit stuff was poisonous – but it certainly didn't look healthy. The little blue ribbon from the collar of Cream's dress had been torn off; fashioned by the rabbit into a neat little bandage around her ankle. She'd always been good with the medical stuff… even if the rings' ubiquity meant she rarely got chance to apply her talent.  
"Cream… are you okay?" Amy asked, trying not to wince at the state her friend was in. The redundancy of the question wasn't lost on Amy. It was quite obvious that the answer was 'No'.

The rabbit's shaky reply came barely audible over the high pitched _pings_ of sabot shrapnel casting against stonework, as the crates' munitions continued to sizzle and burst. "I… I couldn't find him, Miss Amy," Cream stammered, "…couldn't find Cheese-chao… and I didn't know where I was… and… and I tried to… find you but you weren't…"

"Ssh, it's okay, Cream, it's okay," Amy consoled, as tears mingled with the viscous filth in her friend's fur. She hugged the bunny tightly, ignoring chill slickness when the alien gunk on Cream's coat seeped into her dress's fibres. "We'll find Cheese and we'll go home, you'll see. But we've got to move, right now. We've got to get to the tower where the robots were. You understand? Shadow's still fighting in there."

"M-Mister Shadow's here?" the rabbit asked. She didn't sound entirely reassured by the prospect. The black hedgehog wasn't exactly child friendly - or _anything _friendly, for that matter - a fact which Cream had managed to pick up on _even_ _during_ the chaos aboard the Egg Ray.

"He's… he's helping us," Amy managed, in an attempt to reassure the shaken bunny. 'Maybe at least one of us will believe that,' the hedgehog thought. Then again, she wasn't even certain it _was _Shadow…  
"But anyway, we've gotta go, Cream, _now_, before the aliens regroup. You go left, I'll go right; just… run!"

And giving her friend a push in the appropriate direction, Amy launched herself out from behind the stairs.  
Ammo continued to burst within the shattered remnants of the crates, blasting wayward fragments of metal and synthwood across the castle's battlements. Plan B had apparently worked. The initial detonation seemed to have thrown most of the invaders clean off the walls, leaving nothing to replace them but gritty smoke and the stench of burning plastic. Those enemies that were still standing found themselves choked and half-blinded in the mist; so it was only a token salvo of warbling gunfire that chased the fleeing mammals. But you were no less dead if only _one_ plasma wave hit you, Amy grimly reminded herself.

Cream was back at her side again, as they sprinted behind the tower's cover. Despondent light oozed from beneath baleful clouds, Black Arms' lightning statics coating even the moonshadows sanguine.  
"You ready, Cream?" Amy yelled, as their bounding footsteps neared the doorway. Injured, and without Cheese, the rabbit wasn't much of a fighter… but 'not much of a fighter' was better than 'not fighting at all'. Three Mobians against a squadron of badniks was _always _better than two.  
But Cream didn't answer. She jerked to a halt on the slick stonework, so fast Amy had to stop as well, to keep the bunny from falling over. The hedgehog's surprised exclamation died in her mouth, as she watched the look develop on her friend's slime-streaked face. Cream's massive ears stood on end, quivering. And the rabbit's eyes; if she thought Cream had looked scared _before_…

Ears twitched.  
"I- I- Inside," the rabbit squeaked, chocolate pupils darting franticly between Amy and the doorway, as if imploring her to deny the voice that was creeping into her hearing. "It- the… the _bad __man_!"

"Cream, it's okay," Amy told her, squeezing the rabbit's shoulders. Somewhere off in the distance, rumbling explosions coursed through Metropolis, as the Black Comet's searing beams raked through another sector of the city. "I told you, Shadow's helping… us…"

And then she saw them.  
One black hedgehog, striding out of the doorway. And above him -  
Silver and chrome. The black hemisphere of an antigravity plate. In the centre, nestled within a forest of antennae and sensor dishes... the screen.

"A 'bad man'? And I thought your mother had taught you manners, _**vermin**_."


	7. Where Loyalties Lie

**_Author note_**

**_This has been sat on my computer for about two weeks. There was going to be an extra Chaotix section in this chapter, but as I continue to write it, it's gotten longer and longer and I've decided to split it in two. So this offering is a mite shorter than the usual. But if it's any consolation, I'm 2/3rds of the way through the NEXT one as well, so there won't (shouldn't) be such an execrable wait for the next update. :)_**

**_Your enjoyment of this chapter may be enhanced by reminding yourself of the Team Dark plot of Sonic Heroes first.  
YouTubing "Sonic Heroes Team Dark Cutscenes" should do the trick._**

* * *

The cell was not new.  
Espio had been told what the new cells were like. Three foot by two. Steel. No lights. You didn't need room to get cozy. You wouldn't be staying there long.

This… no, this had been designed in happier times, if you cared to believe what the eldest Metropolitans would tell you. When they lived in wonder instead of fear; when the city wore its secret names with pride. There had been nothing that would have necessitated the cells' use, back then. Perhaps… perhaps _he_ had known all along, how it would all turn out in the end. Perhaps his true nature was beginning to show, even then, as the great machines laid down those first giant keystones.  
Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy, Espio wondered? To build a jail in a land which barely knew the word for crime?  
Yes… designed in happier times. When a night in the cells meant a night in the cells. Now, the nights always ended the same way. You'd greet the dawn with chromium eyes.

The cell was not new, and it was not bright.

Three glowstrips, recessed into the walls. Looked like they'd failed a long time ago. Cautious light crept in through the open portal. It lingered at the doorway - as if the photons themselves were reluctant to illuminate any more than they had to. There was something in there, though. At the back of the chamber. A shadow of a shadow, moving in the viscid gloom.  
It rasped. It spoke.

The cell was not new, and it was not bright. And it smelled of mints.

"Returned, returned, returned, has it, my dear? Bringing the new friends, to play with, he does?"

* * *

The picture was low-resolution. Grainy. Pixels crackling with white noise, as the radio backwash of a million energy weapons reduced the airwaves of Metropolis to electromagnetic hell. Shielded bandwidth was in _very_ short supply.

But he was nothing if not easily recognizable. That cruel, spheroid face, flabby jowls melting necklessly into the straining collar of a crimson lab coat. The bristled moustache, sprouting out above crooked lips to vanish off beyond the edges of the screen. Tiny eyes, concealed and concealing; recondite behind blackened spectacles.  
The Doctor. The Eggman.  
The Father.

"Oh, and I see Miss Rose has decided to take advantage of my city's facilities _as_ _well_ as this gutter-mouthed rabbit," his screen-face sneered, cameras buzzing and swiveling around the circumference of the bulbous drone. Cream flinched at the insult, as if she'd been struck. "You two are becoming like a latter-day hedgehog and fox. How… _precious_."  
Robotnik's face broke apart in a wash of static; when his image returned a second later, the Doctor's countenance bore only scowling disgust. "And I didn't appreciate it when _those _rats presumed upon my hospitality either, all those years ago. But at least _they_ had the decency to stay underground. Where _vermin_ belong."

The Ultimate Lifeform simply watched, arms folded, as the floating pod bore down towards Amy and Cream. It had no weapons. Anyone could see that. But even so, they shrank back. Clutching each other, in some pathetic attempt at mutual reassurance. The Doctor… the Doctor was good. He knew the value of intimidation. Knew the value of _fear_.

Wayward cinders coursed across Shadow's view, carried up the sleek black stone of the castle walls by the vicious updrafts from the burning streets below. Seen from the battlements, the entire northern quarter of The Glorious Metropolis Of The Ineffable Father was ablaze, searing orange mixing with sickly reds to paint the entire horizon as a hellscape of ruin and destruction. It did not occur to Shadow, to wonder why the city's full name was in his head.

"Don't you _dare _talk about Sonic like that, you… _you_!" Amy shot back at the scientist, her retort cutting off as if she was unable to locate any pejorative of sufficient strength to express the depth of her hatred. Silhouetted against the glow, the pink hedgehog was visibly shaking; but not _entirely _from fear. That red dress clung to her slight figure, glowfruit ichor glistening wetly in the moonlight. Dirty, vermilion quills, framing frightened green eyes.  
"You're getting just what you _deserve_ here, Eggman," she persisted, anger not _quite_ masking the quiver in her voice from Shadow's ears. "How do _you_ like it, when monsters come from another world and burn down _your_ home? You're losing against them, aren't you? They're going to take Metropolis from you, and-"

Towards the east, air howled in electric syllables as the Black Comet knifed another pillar of iridescent radiance into the concrete flesh of the city. A refinery, it must have hit, or a fuel silo - for the laser's furious scream was answered by a flashing gout of orange fire, mushrooming into the sky to lash against the clouds' seething undersides. It drowned out Amy's voice – but made the girl's point for her, far more succinctly than her quailing speech ever could have.

Still; Shadow was impressed by the pink hedgehog's defiance. Just a little. He wouldn't have thought she had it in her, to be quite that _suicidal_.

Robotnik's drone swayed drunkenly in the air, its screen ablaze with fizzing interference. The black hedgehog didn't know if Amy's battle assessment was on the mark; but the Doctor's face, when it emerged from the static blizzard, made the reality quite plain.  
Someone with the upper hand would not turn that shade of red.

Eggman wrenched his pod around, bringing it to face the Ultimate Lifeform with the unmistakable air of a man reaching for an _axe_.

"SHADOW!" the Doctor roared, multiple chins quivering with scarlet fury as lightning peeled through the clouds above them. The air _tasted _of it, of electricity and wrath. "_KILL THEM_! _Remove this trash from my city! I want them eliminated! Thrown down_-"

"No."

Eggman's screaming tirade ground to an abrupt halt as Shadow uttered his casual negative. The fat man's jaw continued to move, soundlessly… like Robotnik was trying to physically _chew_ his way through incoherent rage. Atop the pod, sensors thrashed and swiveled, as though reflecting their master's disposition.

"You seem confused, human, so let me make myself perfectly clear," the hedgehog continued, brushing some imaginary speck of dirt from the casing of his expropriated alien weapon. "I came here for my past, for _answers_. And you are going to start providing them, Father of Machines, or I will _personally_ see to it that the Black Arms do not have anything left to destroy in this city. I'm not here to run your errands or help you out with your little battle and your petty vendettas. I don't take orders from you, Doctor. I'm not one of your robots."

The words hung in the air, accentuated by the bone-deep rumble of some distant explosion above Metropolis. The four of them were alone, on the black stone parapet; the skirmish for control of the facility seemed to have passed them by, as the robots fell back from the outer ramparts. Smoke swirled across the castle walls – sharply scented, of fire and oil. Amy and Cream, standing there; eyes fixed on the pod with equal parts fear and loathing.

And the Eggman…  
It was just a chuckle, at first. A sly wheeze of cruel levity, as the Doctor pushed his pod forwards, edging towards the black hedgehog's position. But it built, as the drone bobbed closer, a dry, vindictive cackle, rattling out of the speakers as the fat man's body wobbled sickeningly in ripples of grotesque, incomprehensible mirth.  
Even Shadow took a step back, as the pod swooped down, bringing the screen within inches of his oval nose. He could make out individual pixels, this close. There was no trace of the hatred, the anger, which had gripped Robotnik so totally only seconds ago. It had all been swept away, replaced with _this_. Wry, confident, _disturbing_ amusement.

" 'Not one of your robots'…" the Doctor repeated slowly, as if savoring the hedgehog's assertion. He chuckled again, moustache bouncing. The Ultimate Lifeform almost thought he could _see_ the madness, shining out of the Father's glasses.  
"…are you _absolutely sure_ about that, Shadow Android?"

And inside Shadow's mind, something _clicked_.  
In the air: that stench. Fire and oil.  
Rail Canyon. The image flashed in his memory, of those robots, smashed and sparking, bleeding indigo fuel onto the striated rocks of the great gorge, two years ago. The same smell, back then, filling his nostrils as he stared at the ruined machines. _Shadow androids_.

…And the way Rouge had moved, just days later; emerging from the Egg Ray's storehouse - hands empty, and ears drooping. How she'd refused to meet his eyes, after Metal Overlord. It had… it'd felt like he'd been kicked in the stomach, as he watched her go; leaving him there on the shattered decking of that great skyship.  
Omega to his right, cradling Metal Sonic in titanium claws.  
Three of a kind. Appropriate company.

Shadow's face remained fixed; but behind his eyes, existential dread clawed at the hedgehog's mind with grim, steel fingers. It was only visible for a split-second, of blinking hesitation; a tiny crack in the hedgehog's expression, before Shadow caught himself, clamped the emotions down.  
But Robotnik had seen it, in his crimson eyes: seen the uncertainty, the ambivalence, the _fear_.

"It is only through _me_, Shadow, that you can ever be sure," Eggman averred, his words like cloying poison in the hedgehog's ears. "The schematics, the records… the _proof_, of what you are; it all lies here, within Metropolis. You _**must **_do as I command, Shadow. You _**will **_assist in the defense of my city; or the one chance you have, to understand what you truly are… it dies if Metropolis falls to-"

"_Mister Shadow, don't listen to that bad man!_"  
Their eyes snapped sideways, the childish voice wrenching human and hedgehog out of their private immersion like flicking off a light switch. The night rolled forcibly back into Shadow's awareness; the swirling smoke, the bricks of the castle, the staccato rumblings of artifice and strife in the distance... overhead, a Black Arms dropship roared across the static sky, Egg Drones pursuing like hungry wasps.

Cream's orange shoes were planted on the flagstones, her ears streaming behind her in the battlefield winds, glaring at Robotnik's drone with fury plastered across her young face. Amy stood at the rabbit's side, regarding her sable counterpart with urgent eyes.

"Shadow, _don't_!" she implored, raising her voice above the dropship's noise. "This – this is what he _does_, Shadow! Eggman lies, he _twists_ things, he twists _people_. This is just what he did to Knuckles, and to Tails, on the ARK! You can't… you _mustn't_ listen to him!"

The Ultimate Lifeform blinked at her.  
Shadow's head was in complete turmoil. Tantalizing fragments of memory weaved through his awareness, mocking him, slipping out of his grasp _every time_ he reached for them… The Doctor's claims, and Amy's, and Black Doom's; Rouge; the confusion, the battle… they all swam together, shapes and smells and colours and sounds, emotions, intentions, decisions; dancing and twisting inside of his mind, to the Emeralds' unfathomable melodies. It all… didn't make sense...  
Could he even trust his own thoughts, if the Doctor's words were true?  
From behind the screen, Eggman's half-moon grin swam in his vision like a smiling demon. He recognized it, dimly. From the deepest, damaged recesses of his memory, there came a garbled surge of half-remembered familiarity. A man – a man named _Robotnik _– giant moustache looming over the hedgehog… and the knowledge, the _certainty_, that… this was the man who had created him. That he was looking at his Father.

The pink hedgehog's sharp intake of breath could be heard even over the background din of warfare, as the Ultimate Lifeform leveled his gun right at her head.  
The fat man's grin broadened. Shadow could actually see the blood draining out of Cream's face and ears.

"You do know that these two aren't working with the Black Arms, Doctor?" he asked casually, without glancing back at the pod. "Is it really necessary to-"

"_I am not interested _in your assessment of what is or is not tactically relevant, Shadow," Robotnik spat back, voice hissing metallically out of the drone's speakers. "_Every _interloper is to be forcibly excised from Metropolis, and you are to start here. So _remove this trash from my city_. Do **not** make me tell you again."

The hedgehog growled; ears folded back against his head, incisors shining in the moonlight. He didn't take kindly to orders.  
Hot gusts from the burning refinery ruffled the white down on Shadow's chest. But he stepped forwards across the black stones, toward the girls. Amy held out gloved hands, appealing.

"No! Shadow y– you can't, you're not _yourself_! He _always _lies, and he'll- Shadow please just stop, don't; or..."

Shadow barked out a harsh laugh, prompting twin flinches from both Amy and Cream. "Or _what_, Amy Rose?" he queried sardonically, slow footsteps carrying him closer to the duo. "What could you _possibly_ do to threaten me!? I'm the one holding the gun. Like that pathetic blue hedgehog, you fail to understand t-"

_CRACK!_

The impact would have fractured his skull, if not for the obsessive diligence of long-dead military biophysicists. Shadow span through the air as if gravity had temporarily lost all interest in him. The hedgehog's head smashed against the floor, three whole metres away from where his feet had been half a second ago. Whole senses vanished; sight replaced by blind absence, smell by the drowning sensation of a nasal cavity flooded with blood. He could feel _teeth_, trickling out of the corner of his mouth, before those nerves shut down as well.  
Over the screaming pain of ruptured eardrums, Shadow heard "_Let's_ _GO, Cream!_". There was a swish of – wings? And then…

He coughed once, horribly; gore and wrecked dentistry splattering onto the cold stones. Her mallet had hit him square in the jaw. Where the hell had it come fr-

The Ultimate Lifeform passed out. For almost ten whole seconds.

* * *

When he awoke, frantic regeneration processes had already pieced most of his optic nerves back together. Tailored cells swarmed to the ragged edges of open veins, sealing, coagulating. The hedgehog was a created thing, and Shadow healed obscenely swiftly. The blood he spilled was laced with germicide and counter-toxin. It was replenished by three interdependent spleen organs, and distributed by a vascular system that could function peristalticly even if his six-chambered heart somehow stopped beating.  
Shadow didn't know these things, though. And it didn't stop his eyelids from feeling like sandpaper, as he inched them open to the unwelcoming sight of bloodstained flagstones.

He had seen himself bleed before, of course. The human forces in Glyphic Canyon… they had been more accurate than he would ever have expected. Or would ever admit. But it was only through the distorted consciousness of rapidly-healing concussion, that he actually _looked _at it. He had never considered the significance of that colour before.  
Shadow's blood was green.

"Enjoying your nap?" growled a voice from above him.

Less than a day ago, the hedgehog had flipped over a _bus _on the broken streets of downtown Westopolis. It took considerably more effort, right now, to flip himself onto his back. He felt sick. _Everything_ hurt.  
That rolling red tempest of Black Arms cloud filled his vision, as Shadow stared up at the sky. It was oddly comforting. The black crenellations of Robotnik's castle towered at the edges of his sight, rigid and brooding. Some still threw munitions into the sky, shining darts of violence, chasing down alien warships. But far more simply belched smoke.

As for the man himself…  
Eggman wasn't even looking at him. The pod showed a profile view of the fat scientist's bulbous head, as Robotnik's attention focused on something off the side of the screen. He was typing on an unseen console, the frenetic rattle of keys blending in Shadow's ears with the bursts of gunfire on this end.

"Whi…" the hedgehog slurred, as he rolled over again in a failed attempt to stand up. Tentatively, Shadow explored the side of his mouth with a cautious tongue. Four… five of his teeth were gone. They'd take _days _to grow back on their own. His expression hardened.  
"Which way did they _go!?_" he managed, levering himself upright properly this time, though the nausea made him stagger. It would pass on its own, eventually. Shadow didn't have the patience to search for rings. He had people to kill.

"And I thought you said you didn't have time for petty vendettas, Shadow," the Doctor responded, finally deigning to spare the sable animal a glance. Mangled by interference, and filled with disdain; but there it was. "Forget them. The black creatures are moving faster than I had anticipated, which means there are more… _pressing_ concerns."

"Such as?" Shadow queried, through teeth clenched in both pain and frustration. Father or no, it piqued, to take instructions from this pugnacious mountain of lard.

In the distance, something massive exploded. The sky flashed actinic green, and Robotnik's pod sank in the air, bringing the Doctor's face level with the hedgehog's own. "I need you to light five giant lanterns for me, Shadow," the human grinned, as viridian ions danced across the underside of sanguine clouds. "They're part of my _special_ defenses."


	8. The Light Fantastic

**_Author Note_**

**_Remember when I said this chapter should be up faster?  
Boy, did I lie.  
But here it is NOW. :)_**

* * *

They stood there, in the cell's circular doorway. It seemed unwise to advance.  
Espio sagged against the curving duracrete, struggling to keep himself centered. Nausea squirmed in his belly, and the breathing exercises designed to suppress it only succeeded in drawing more of the fetid air into his lungs, ripe with the taste of blood and sugar. The chameleon couldn't see anything, beyond the vague impression of movement. The back of the cell remained resolutely pitch black.

"No, no, he's didn't brought them to Wendy, no? Come on their own, have they, to visit?" the unseen speaker continued. It was a woman's voice, corrupted by age, and delivered in shrill tones with the unmistakable edge of insanity. "But Wendy has no soup for them, she doesn't, a bad Wendy, bad Wendy, bad Witchcart, that isss_sss_…"  
Espio glanced up at Vector. The crocodile had the best night vision of the team; but even so, the ninja could see him squinting into the dark, uncertainly. Espio palmed a throwing star, twisting the metal shape between his fingers. The weight of chill steel was at least slightly reassuring. The speaker was moving forwards.

And what resolved into view, as his eyes adjusted and the figure progressed closer, was easily the oldest human the chameleon had ever seen.  
It was as if a blind child had taken a skeleton, then inexpertly wrapped it in yellow skin and black-grey cloth. The woman's features looked as though they had been cut from old wax, and by a sculptor who only had a vague idea what human faces should look like. Tiny, rheumy eyes darted back and forth inside hooded sockets, shining like cut silver in the dim half-light. That parchment hide stretched taut across a cragged skull, only half-masked by a sparse covering of dull grey fur. No – the humans called it hair, didn't they? It was a measure of Espio's flagging constitution, that he would even temporarily forget something like that.  
Except… she wasn't entirely human.  
Vector took a step backwards, as the rest of this woman entered their vague puddle of light. The chameleon could hear Charmy, buzzing agitatedly behind them as he took in the rest of the ancient creature. And the bee had always posessed the strongest stomach of them all.

She ended at the waist. Studded with dials, and tubes, and moving inhalators – what replaced the substance of the woman, from waist to floor – was a mechanical cart.  
It squeaked, and wheezed, as the wheels turned, bearing the crone across the dirty concrete floor. A trio of pistons churned in unison at the cart's back, pushing clouded liquids through glassy, looping conduits. The Eggman logo grinned out from the trolley's front, Robotnik proudly proclaiming himself author of this mechanised abomination.  
The irony was lost on Chaotix.

"But Wendy wouldn't give _this one_ any," the half-a-prisoner muttered, eyeing Vector with blatant disapproval. Sweet wrappers lay scattered around the cell; they crinkled quietly, as the cart's wheels span deftly across the detritus. "Doesn't need any soup, does he? He's too tall already. All of them, all too tall, since fatty stole her shoes. No soup. No soup. They can't have any! It's only for Wendy, now. Only for Wendy and her friend…"

Espio and Charmy exchanged worried looks, and the insect shook his head, conclusively. The old woman didn't have a spot of green on her. There was absolutely no way she could have been responsible for the Black Arms outside.

The chameleon coughed noisily, in an effort to draw the wretched creature out of her babbling. "Who… are you?" he hazarded. "And do you know what happened outside?"

"_Hider!_" the crone spat, leveling an accusatory finger at Espio with enough swiftness and force to startle them all. Her hair shook, and spittle flew from between withered lips. "Like the fat man, he is, a hider! Hides from himself, yessss... He was backwards, and he hides, from what he did, he hides, but Wendy knows! They all tell Wendy their secrets, before they go; singing, singing, the little birds, they sing. The secret names, they told her. Kintobor's Dream! He hides it, he hides it…"

"Boss, I think she's… err… crazy," Charmy commented redundantly, as Witchcart's babbling proceeded, an unceasing torrent of nonsense. Experimental subjects did not tend to last long in the Doctor's care. And their sanity, substantially less so.  
"We should go. And find Amy and Cream. Or get outta here altogether? Maybe?" The bee added hopefully, his striped antennae wiggling unhappily in the air, soaking up the scent of fouled candy. Charmy's eyes followed Witchcart, as the human motored pointlessly from one blank wall to the other. The bee's vision was fixed on the join; that tube-studded discontinuity between flesh and metal, where black cloth met grey iron, and the woman merged grotesquely with the substance of the cart.  
Espio couldn't decide which was harder to stomach; the pulsing, intestinal pipes that snaked across the surface of the trolley, or the blatant brutality of alien carnage that they'd left on the other side of the portal. At least that stuff didn't still _breathe_.

Vector didn't respond to Charmy's observation. He was squinting towards the back of the cell, slowly discerning more and more as his eyes adjusted to the scarcity of light. There were things written there; half-formed sentences etched into the dirt and grime of the wall, amidst mad jumbles of lines and broken, spiral patterns.  
There were a _lot_ of them. Witchcart must have been in here for a long time.

"…tricky fox, tricky fox, but she took his mouth away!" the human babbled, addressing one of the broken light fittings in a conspiratorial tone. "Clever, clever, she stitched it up! He can't steals the candies now, he can't…"

The crocodile sighed, wrenching his eyes away and towards his two colleagues. "You're right, Charmy," he admitted. "There's nothing we can do here. She can't help us, and we can't help her." Vector glanced back at the mad woman, his reptilian face a strange mixture of sympathy and revulsion, and shook his head. "I don't think there's anyone left in there _to _help. If there was, she'd have gotten out of here herself."

"Remembers, Wendy does, about them all, he told her," the muttering continued. "Shelly told her, about the squirrely, and the ones who never turns down works that pays. But she doesn't like them, they're too tall, all of them! Took her shoes, and they're too tall…"

Espio turned to leave, trudging out of the circular portal behind the crocodile. But as Witchcart's words fully filtered into his brain, his feet halted in mid-step. The throwing star almost fell out of Espio's hand.  
Did she say-

It was a sad fact of their lives, that the Chaotix Detective Agency was a business known more to disgruntled creditors than the general public. Even in Grand Hexeacopolis, where-

"You know us?" Vector asked, whipping his sinuous body around, teeth bared in suspicion as if he suddenly expected some elaborate trap to abruptly spring closed on them all. "How did you hear our motto? Where did you _come _from?"

_Shelly told her about squirrely_

"They know him, they know him, the red one, with the sparkly; outside the time, they know him, but Wendy doesn't, no, no no," Witchcart continued, showing absolutely no sign of concern at the detective's sudden interest. "Answers, they wants, but don't know the questions! Pays, pays, that's how she pays, and they won't turn down work, never, never, if it pays, he said…"

Lit by the green illumination from the corridor, Vector's face wore the extremely rare expression of being completely dumbfounded. At his feet, sweet wrappers shifted restlessly, blown in lazy waves by the downdraft from Charmy's wings. The airborne insect was the first one to process Witchcart's ramblings, which went to prove just how nonsensical the whole situation was.  
"Is she… hiring us?" the insect asked.

_Shelly told her about squirrely_

"…five became four became three, they did!" Witchcart hissed at the walls. "Land of Darkness, Land of Sky, wanders, wanders, who can find him? Wendy knows, Wendy knows, but will she tell? Will she…"

_Shelly_.

"**_Mighty_**" Espio breathed.

* * *

"Five became four became three", Witchcart had said, and she had not been wrong. Chaotix had known more members, its earliest days; back when Espio had been in charge, before it became clear that Vector was far more suited to the task. After the mechanical chaos of Newtrogic High Zone, their nascent detective agency had briefly included the last echidna in the world. Amongst others.  
Knuckles had stayed with them only briefly; part client, part member, until the shackles of duty pulled him back to the island where he was born. Although the armadillo had always liked to brag it was because he couldn't stand the prospect of losing an arm-wrestling match.

Espio the chameleon, Vector the crocodile, Charmy Bee, and Mighty the armadillo. _That _was Chaotix Detective Agency. For years, it had been the four of them; taking commissions, solving crimes, tracking down fugitives from Star Light Zone to Station Square and everywhere in between.  
Mighty had been the brawns of the outfit; deploying - as the chameleon would often put it – "crude and excessive thuggery" in situations where a more restrained and technical _zanshin_ combativeness was less impressive to the local criminal fraternity. The red-shelled armadillo had been incredibly good at it, as well; even Espio had to admit that.

And then he had vanished.

It had been an entirely unremarkable case, up to that point. Some tinpot thieves in Radical City, tried to hold up a bank and things went bad. Left eight dead; six Mobian, two human. But stuff like that happened every day in Radical City. No-one with money would have cared - except one of the humans was some big-shot Soleannan industrialist, in the wrong place at the wrong time. And thatmeant _these _thieves were worth tracking down.  
So they'd been scoping for leads – just like in every other case. Mighty set off in the morning to search the riverside districts; the rest of them some place else, to see what they could dig up. And in the evening… the armadillo never came back.  
That in itself wasn't unusual. It happened, in the Chaotix's line of work. If you were chasing a lead, you chased it. But a day became three days. Then a week.  
And then almost two years.

They'd found the thieves, in the end. But they'd found them floating in the river, shot and dumped there by another criminal gang for the paltry cache of bloodstained rings they _had_ managed to lift from the bank. The circle of life, in Radical City. Chaotix hadn't gotten paid that time, either. Not that the remaining three were in any position to care.

There had been _nothing_. Not a single trace of the armadillo, anywhere. They had turned down jobs, lucrative, **legitimate** jobs, to chase up the vague recollections of individual bystanders who said they might have seen a reddish Mobian over near the riverside that morning. Every lead was a dead one. For _twenty_-_three_ _months_, every lead was a dead one.

But this woman…

Espio's feet were still rooted to the ground, as Vector turned from perplexed statue to whiplash dervish in half an instant. Before Wendy could blink, the croc had launched himself forward to the front of her cart, gold chains thrashing angrily. His hands gripped the crone's night-black stole, vice-like; a reptilian muzzle bared row after row of very sharp teeth, millimeters in front of the human's eyes. Charmy buzzed angrily behind him – mostly frustrated that the crocodile had gotten to her first.

"The armadillo" Vector growled, fiercely. "Where _is he?_"

The witch chuckled insensibly, her pupils skittering across the detectives's scaled face like drunken marbles. "Fatty asks questions too, with sharps, but Wendy didn't tell, didn't know," she answered. "Gone, the shelly, gone, but they wants to know where! And they'll do something for Wendy, before she remembers."

"We're not gonna do anything for you, you crazy old lady!" Charmy interjected, hovering above, his stinger wagging threateningly – never mind the fact he was too young to really intimidate anyone, let alone _this_ oblivious, ancient creature. "Tell us where Mighty is, or you're gonna get it!"

Espio was forcibly restraining himself from yelling much the same thing. Attempting to focus his _ki_, to bring his surprise and anger and disbelief under control; it was hard, with the injured nausea crawling in his gut like a nest of Shamari vipers. The ninja locked his eyes on the back wall: something solid, something fixed, to keep himself from throwing up. Years of Witchcart's insane etchings did not help matters; but at least the _concrete _didn't sway in his vision. Gibberish sentences wound across the surface, with complex, angular characters that Espio didn't recognize as any kind of language at all. That had always been Knuckles' specialty. Spidery diagrams networked their way upwards and…  
And…

He and Charmy hadn't looked hard enough when they first stepped inside, scouring the cell for signs of the Black Arms' killer. Witchcart's scrawlings ended above a certain height - the woman's hands could only reach up so far, to scribble in the thick film of grime and dust. But there was something else up there; words painted onto the greyed filth, instead of erased from it. Painted in green ichor, barely visible at all in the dingy illumination.  
They asked a nonsense question.  
And they asked it in blood.

Espio turned back to the half-mechanised human, his shout cutting through Vector and Charmy's fruitless interrogation. "Who else was _in here_ with you!?" Espio demanded.

Behind him, and above, in murky, trickling letters, lay the words:

_**CaN yOu FeeL thE suNsHInE ??**_

* * *

The beast struggled, fleshy psuedopods wriggling under Shadow's gloves as he held the protrusions like living reins. Grey, leathery wings beat an unsteady rhythm on either side of the hedgehog, as the ugly, bat-like creature hauled itself (and its unwanted passenger) between the wrecked towers of the Cryptic Castle. Shadow had not been gentle in subduing the Black Volt. At least the creature had learned – eventually – that struggling to throw him off was both fruitless and painful.

The sky was clogged with them; Black Volts by the hundreds, sweeping above the ruined defenses on fiery updrafts, hunting down the last vestiges of the Doctor's air force. The Egg Fleet had been forced out of the battle; with the Black Comet overhead, the great ships were nothing but targets. Groundside, Shadow had seen only a handful of functioning badniks, even from his high vantage - and those he had glimpsed, through the clouds and the smoke and the swarm of alien wings - were in full retreat, crashing and crawling and rolling through the wreckage of the metal city, withdrawing to the final defensive lines, around the Cathedral of Transformation. Even as the robots fell back, Black Arms swept in behind, a relentless tide of grey and crimson. Fresh troops were pouring into the city, dropships descending with impunity now the skies were safe, disgorging their legions onto the laser-glassed ruins of Theta-Upsilon's weapons shops or Phi-Sigma's decimated fusion labs. Shadow almost thought he could smell them, under the stench of ozone and fire; a scent of expectant fanaticism, coiling through the invader armies, as the machines were forced out of block by plasma-scorched block.

In their confidence, they weren't looking up.  
It wouldn't have done them much good anyway, even if they had spotted that this Black Volt was a little… spikier than usual. But still, inattention cost the aliens their one chance at a clear shot, as Shadow wrestled his mount towards the final stop on Eggman's itinerary. He was coming in fast; but that didn't bother the Ultimate Lifeform at all. In fact, he could…

Shadow leapt just as the creature slammed face-first into the floor of the tower, letting loose a piercing screech of pain and outrage. Bourne along the parapet by forward momentum, the Volt's outstretched wings knocked down two of the Black Arms troopers – and carried them straight over the edge of the building. Shadow landed expertly on the rim of the fifth giant lantern, his hoverskates' jets glowing golden as their metallic treads eased onto solid ground. The remaining aliens looked at him in shock, five pairs of compound eyes connected to minds which had… not quite managed to process that the hedgehog had just flown in from nowhere and killed two of their comrades.

"_Boo._" Shadow announced.

The parapet exploded in weapons fire, magenta ribbons of force melting into the stones where he had been standing an eighth of a second earlier. The hedgehog launched himself forwards on hoverskate plumes, rocketing into one of the troopers and sending it cannoning backwards to knock down a second. Energy bolts sizzled all around him, gouging chunks of glowing masonry out of the floor wherever they struck. One snapped the tapering steel support of a blue-fire torch; Shadow snatched the flaming metal out of the air, bringing it round in a sweeping arc to strike down another one of the aliens.  
Two left. And they were –

The shot hit him square in the back, toppling him straight to the unforgiving stones. Shadow didn't even have enough air in him to roar in pain, as the plasma fire caught on his ebon fur and set his spines instantly ablaze.  
He had been shot a _lot _of times, even in the short portion of his life which the hedgehog could actually remember. But this was amongst the worst. The Black Arms' hungry flames attacked Mobian flesh with insatiable ferocity; Shadow could feel the blood _boil _inside his spikes, smell charred muscles, sloughing apart as the energy spread…  
…and he felt it _stop_, felt it _never happen_, as the rings he was carrying *blinked* out of existence. The hedgehog rolled sideways, putting the smooth, machine-studded stone of the giant lantern's well between himself and the Black Arms, and giving himself time to hazily verify that he _was_ still alive. The rings… they took away the injuries, took away the pain; but they didn't take away the _memory _of that pain. And rapidly burning to death was one recollection Shadow would rather not retain.

His breathing was ragged, as lingering golden geometries faded out of the corners of his vision. There wasn't any _time_ to lie here! He had to –  
The torch was still within reach, lying on the ground where he'd dropped it, blue flame flickering dimly between the skewed metal fingers of the brazier's rim. Shadow could hear the Black Arms approach, their splayed feet treading cautiously across the warped stone. Even over the background din of clashing lasers and keening Black Volts… biophysically optimised ears did not lie. He knew exactly where his opponents were.  
_Now_.  
The black hedgehog sprang out from behind the firepit, and _threw_. A flashing blur of grey and sapphire whirred through the air even whilst the aliens pointed their guns – action abruptly curtailed by a pair of fleshy _thwaks_, as the spinning rod of metal imparted unambiguously fatal momentum into the side of their heads. The newts crumpled simultaneously, like reptilian origami folding in on itself.

The brazier's flight was only finally, noisily halted when it bounced off the underside of a certain floating robotic pod.  
Chrome senses swiveled irritably as the drone righted itself. "Oh, _thank you_, Shadow," Eggman snarled from the telescreen, lips curling as he manipulated controls. "I go to all the trouble of following you here, to give you the benefit of my _limitless_ genius in guidance, and _this _is the welcome I get?"  
In the distance, behind the descending machine, the hedgehog could see fires spreading, the inferno of northern Metropolis creeping eastwards. Conventional flames proving just as tenacious as the peculiar cyan variety.

Shadow's eyes narrowed. He could still feel the ghost of his own incineration creeping across his spines, and it did not place him in the best mood for parley. "You've been spectacularly unhelpful so far, "Father" " the hedgehog countered, as he strode over to retrieve the flickering pole of blue fire. "I'd have been quite capable of locating these oversized lamps without your… supervision."

The fat man sneered sardonically out of his machine's static haze. "Oh, come now, Shadow. You know what they say. The more the merrier."

"Will you please _stop_ _saying_ _that_?" the sable creature asked, wearily. Robotnik's clichés had _never _been amusing, and repetition did nothing to salvage them.

"Will you please _activate_ _my_ _defenses_?" the Fat Man spat back in mimicry.

Shadow growled, baring his teeth at the scientist as he tossed the recovered brazier over his shoulder. It clanged loudly against the floor of the lantern well; a sound followed by the gaseous _whumph _of ignition. Robotnik's final giant lantern burst into life, pushing aside the red glow of the Black Arms' clouds and bathing the ruined parapet in cerulean radiance. The Ultimate Lifeform grimaced into the glow; these larger fires made his spines… itch.

"_There_," he announced. "I've completed your insane task, human. Not that it will do you any good. This city is lost. So you'd better start talking answers _quickly_, or I –"

"You would be wise to stand back from the lantern, rodent," Eggman interrupted, completely ignoring Shadow's half-finished demand. The hedgehog could see him toying with dials at the other end of the screen; status bars crept towards green, reflected in the black lenses of Robotnik's glasses. "It may be that this process has some… unpleasant side effects. For you specifically."

"We had a deal, fat man," Shadow reminded him, very conspicuously removing an energy weapon from the dead grip of a Black Arms.

"You wanted answers, I seem to recall?" Robotnik grinned, his pudgy finger hovering over the final switch in his sequence. "Well, my dear Shadow… if this kills you as well, we'll _both_ have learnt something interesting, won't we?"  
He flicked the switch. The machines in the firepit whirred. And all hell broke loose.

The black hedgehog was thrown to the floor by a concussive hammerblow of scorched air. Behind, the giant lantern flared; its fire ballooning two, three, four times its original size. Shadow landed – painfully – facing towards the rest of the Cryptic Castle, and he could see two of the other four torches blossoming likewise, their cobalt flames reaching far into the sky. A handful of Black Volts, those closest to the incandescent pillars… they simply dropped out of the air like rocks.

Down below, the streets bloomed into light.  
It moved along, through, and under, self-propogating flames coursing down the open passageways that had troubled the Chaotix; fuelled by the haze of doped petroleum that had soaked Cream and Amy. From a thousand torn fissures and craters, it rose up: fiery plumes drifting lazily into the ruined streets. It was eerily beautiful, seen from above; flickering through the Black Arms lines with soft fingers of glowing sapphire.

When the fire touched, invaders died.

Everywhere, through every iron street and corridor, Metropolis shone in fatal blue. No chance to run, no chance to escape; the aliens simply dropped, right where they stood, felled by evanescent tongues of fire. As he picked himself up off the rubble-strewn floor, Shadow's hawkish eyes watched giants topple; annelid worms twitch and spasm in the fleeting fiery ribbons; and in their hundreds, he watched the newts, the normal troopers, simply _fall_.

"Biochemistry," the Doctor explained, as if imagining that someone had asked him what, exactly, was happening. But mad scientists rarely required an actual _inquiry_ to launch into exposition; and Ivo Robotnik was surely the maddest of them all.  
"It seems our guests simply can't _abide_ formaldoximes. Almost completely benign substances, to humans and Mobians, in fact; causing nothing more than mild disorientation, if even that. But for _them_, it serves as quite a potent nerve toxin. The fire is both a functionaliser _and_ a delivery mechanism, capable of…"  
Eggman's dictation faltered, as if he only just remembered who his audience actually was.  
"Hmm. So you _are_ still alive, hedgehog," the Doctor muttered, glancing sideways from his screen. "I expect you're not -"

"You waited." Shadow stated, levelly. The spined silhouette balanced on the very edge of the parapet, gazing out over the blue haze of the 'Father's Glorious Metropolis'.

"And what, exactly, do you mean by _that_, rodent?" the scientist enquired. His pod was turned towards the city, as well, watching the spread of the killing flame as it weaved through the underground networks. Dead Black Volts plummeted out of the skies behind them, a rain of alien flesh, thudding wetly against the bricks of the tower.

"You didn't design these lamps overnight, Eggman," Shadow replied, not diverting his eyes for a moment. In the face of such indiscriminate death as rolled across the city below him, the hedgehog's impatience found itself... tempered. A little.  
"The defences; they were always here. Since the start of the battle. You could have used them when the aliens first attacked. And you didn't."

"Do you even know how _long_ it takes to synthesize and disseminate kerosene-soluble nerve agents across an urban fuel network?" Eggman asked. It was clearly a rhetorical question. The hedgehog even thought he could hear amusement creeping into Robotnik's voice. In the distance, over towards Phi-Sigma, he saw another Black Arms dropship descend towards the flattened plateau of former machinery, just as the blue fires crept across its makeshift landing pad. Very unceremoniously, the alien machine simply tipped over, crashing sideways into the fractured metallic plain.  
"But let's say, hypothetically, that you're right," the Doctor continued, with the tone of a teacher indulging some slow-witted student. "Why, precisely, would I do something that? Why wouldn't I pull the trigger at the first opportunity?"

"Because you're insane?" the Ultimate Lifeform responded. "Because you thought it would be somehow amusing to see how many rampaging alien zealots you could… fit inside the… city…"

The Doctor pivoted his pod in the air, bringing the screen round to face Shadow once again. The look on his mustachioed face made the hedgehog's skin crawl.  
That was it.  
_That was it._

"It was… a _trap_?" Shadow breathed, realization not quite able to subdue the vocal protests of common sense inside his brain.  
"This entire battle… Metropolis… you planned it, didn't you? You resisted them just hard enough, so they kept sending in reinforcements, and then..." the hedgehog waved his glove towards the flickering tendrils of flame below.  
"You waited… You waited so you could kill as many of them as would fit inside the city."

And Doctor Robotnik laughed.  
He didn't stop. Not for a very long time.


	9. Epilogue: An Island Without A Name

**_Author Note:_**

**_You won't have A CHANCE of understanding the ending here, if you havn't played Sonic Chronicles. A lack of Shadow the Hedgehog game knowledge will probably remove any hope of comprehension, as well.  
Jus' sayin'._**

* * *

A seagull drifted lazily over placid, azure waves. The waters were shallow, here; and good hunting, clear tropical seas bustling with brightly coloured fish. Easy to see, even from the airborne heights which the bird occupied. Easy to catch.  
Mobius' sun crawled leisurely across pastel skies. The hours wore on, as the gull darted in and out of sparkling, coral waters. It snatched up south islands cuttlesquid; tiny, purple-white NiGHTSfish; the occasional live honker, migrating its way through the archipelago towards distant Adabat. Fishing was good, today.

And so it was with a satisfied stomach, that the gull allowed its wings to catch hold of a coastal zephyr, and let the cool, mid-evening breezes bear it back home. Above, brilliant reds and purple shades chased the blue out of the sky.

Flakes of brittle, red-brown iron scattered before the bird's flapping approach, as it made an ungainly landing on the weather-beaten promontory that held its home. Orange, webbed feet touched down upon a tarnished spar of steel; the rusted metal bowed dangerously, as the gull settled its full-bellied weight. It neither knew, nor cared, about the curious artificiality of its perch, as it waddled along, ducking its head beneath a metal awning. "Propeller turbine casings" meant nothing to the gull. It merely knew this place as somewhere reasonably warm, that kept out the elements when it rained, and offered a good night's sleep if you were willing to put up with the incessant creaking of metal fatigue.

"_Metal_ _Island_ automated aeronautics production facility" would have meant even less, to this unassuming resident of the now decrepit manufactories. Vines and tree roots crawled around and inside these old, metal ruins, like probing fingers - ponderous yet confident, that they would inevitably drag the buildings down; return the iron to the ground from which taken. Mobian grassnakes and Westside claw-voles made their simple homes within the corroded places, where once the deafening whir of high-tolerance rotorblades would've made life both noisy and exceptionally brief, for the creatures of the island without a name.

Settling itself down onto a sparse carpet of old leaves and windblown grit, the seagull gazed placidly outwards from its nest the with the kind of disconcerned serenity that only a belly full of seafood could really bring. The final colours of the day yet lingered, yellow and crimson hues clinging to the sky like garish, surly actors, refusing to relinquish the stage for twilight's next act.

Down on the beach, the waves lapped quietly against darkening sands. The seagull wasn't concerned one bit, by two black silhouettes, moving slowly along the shoreline.

It continued to be unconcerned, right up to the point when a crudely stitched glove reached down and snapped its neck.

* * *

"Here again, we is.  
Remembers, Wendy does, she remembers, she remember_sssssss_…  
They put Wendy here, put Witchcart here, the ones in black, with the carts, Witchcart, they did, with the carts, with the –  
With the _FOX_, tricky, tricky, she remembers, she remembers, with the tricky fox, they put her here…

He was bad, he was bad, he tries to steals it, he does, Wendy's candy, he steals it…  
Fatty didn't know. He wouldn't _listen!_ Wendy told him, Wendy told him, "He'll steal it! He'll steal it! Hide your candy, Eggman, or he'll steal it!" but he wouldn't listen, never, ever, ever… But Wendy told him again, and again, she did. Sewed him, the fox, to show him, to _make_ the Eggman see, she sewed his mouth _shut!_ And…  
Fatty took him away.  
Fatty took him away. To teach him to _dance_.  
But he couldn't sing, he couldn't sing. She'd sewn his mouth shut! Wendy's friend couldn't sing, he -

Hills!  
Trees!  
Ruin Wood!

She was here before, she remembers. Machines, machines, dancing, dancing! But they didn't see Wendy, no… didn't see her, never, never. She liked it here, with the carts, the carts, before Fatty took her shoes.  
Gave her other things instead, he did, the furry ones, to play with, he did, but she didn't like them. Too tall! Too tall! He couldn't sing, Wendy's friend…  
Sing, sing, sing for him, she made them! Made them, made them sing; the ones Fatty gave her. He liked it, her friend, he liked to hear them sing, right until they broke, they did. She had made them all sing, like the birdies…so fragile, their little bones...

He did so love to hear them _sing_.

Bob bob, bob bob, bobbed beside her. Floating, floating! Just like the tricky one, the tricky fox, but no, but no, this one, this one was Wendy's friend, Witchcart's friend… Wouldn't steal it, wouldn't steal it, no. Brings us things, for the soup, he does, soup f-

_Here_."

* * *

She was flanked by a pair of towering soldiers, and two more marched behind her. Some crude attempt at a snub, she assumed: bringing armed guards to escort her through the facility. Their heavy, metallic boots stomped out a crisp military rhythm against mirrored floor tiles. Above, set into the high ceiling, cerulean lights blazed with actinic radiance. It was a pace hurried, but disciplined, as they moved deeper into the complex, striding purposefully from one harsh puddle of illumination to the next.  
Everything about this place was harsh. The makers had styled it in their own image.

"You're absolutely certain? It's not another of the artificer's sensor sweeps?"

Her voice was barely audible over the pervasive _noise _they all made. Never mind the clanging, thunderous lockstep of their marching gait - gigantic strides carrying the creatures further in one step than she could travel in five – no, it was simply by virtue of _being_, that they filled the air with an angry, hissing crackle. And without her uniform, their charges would make her fur stand on end in a most undignified and quite painful manner – a fact she had discovered, much to her figurative and literal shock, on the very first visit here.

"My subordinates are not incompetent," the High Dictator replied contemptuously. As they moved, his jostling agglomerations of grey-blue steel briefly eclipsed the lux-bulbs' artificial glow. "You would do well not to insult their efforts, _Procurator_."  
These… creatures, if one could charitably call them that, didn't breathe. There were no lungs, to push out the words, no larynx to shape the syllables and send them on their way towards her ears. They spoke with _lightning_, tormenting the air with electric power to thrash out a buzzing approximation of vocals. It made every conversation an audio warzone – and quite a deadly one, if you were fool enough to stand too close. Which, she suspected, suited the giants just fine.

"Yes, Syrax, because your Legion certainly tracked the cat in a competent manner, didn't they?" the black-clad creature retorted levelly. It was without satisfaction, that she watched through her helmet-visor as the Dictator's static core seethed in irritation. The feline had been _such_ an opportunity. For _all _of them. But totally squandered. By cruel chance or procedural ineptitude, it was impossible to say… but she knew full well, that the Imperator had reprimanded Raxos for that particular failure. And Raxos had in turn punished Syrax. No doubt that was the whole reason he was with her now, consigned to escorting a lone military attaché, instead of standing at the General's shoulder while Raxos planned for another xenocidal assault on the Hive.

Still; whether the towering behemoths believed it or not, this was by far the more important project. The military boundaries of Sector Scylla would mean absolutely nothing, to _anyone_, when the Imperator's plan came to fruition. It was audacious to the point of genius; but that was what they had to be, what he had _made_ them be. The Tribe had arrived here with _nothing_; clockwork industry and crude automata, less than a match for any one of the other races. It was only his audacity, his political genius, that had saved them from slavery or extinction more times than anyone could count.  
And just look at them now.

She had been humbled to the point of speechlessness, when he had selected her, for the momentous task of executing his greatest, most glorious vision. The youngest Procurator in the army; but he had selected _her_. The Imperator had held her eternal loyalty and unquestioning obedience since the moment she had donned the matte-black of military uniform – and now he held them twice over.

Vast doors of sheet-metal eased soundlessly open as the variably-statured party arrived at their destination. The warp labs were rife with frenetic activity; moreso than the Procurator had ever seen them before. She involuntarily wrinkled a tiny black nose, as the pervasive scent of burnt nickel infiltrated even through the environmental seal of her faceplate. Steel-shouldered technicians of the Fifth Rampager Legion toiled around blinking screens and great banks of whirring machinery, barging each other out of the way with that peculiar Zoah disregard for physical presence. On the converse, some of Syrax's men almost looked to have abandoned their armours altogether. Jumbled scraps of grey slouched formlessly within massive crucible-chairs, their electric-blue tendrils dancing between and around and _inside _the computer terminals, darting back and forth across the room in thunderbolt arcs that would have set her dreadlocks aflame if not for the sweeping horns of her Procutorial helmet. It was a dangerous illusion, her academy instructors had been determined to impress upon the cadets. No matter how convincing this appearance of discorporation might seem, it was merely that: an appearance. The Zoah _always_ resided inside its metal plating. If you wanted to kill one, fighting the lightning was a fool's errand. You dispatched Zoah the same way you dispatched everything else: by leech blading them in the face.

She was forced to remain close to Syrax, sidling in the Dictator's wake as he barged and clanged his way through the bustling sea of underlings. Zoah tended to "forget their own strength" around members of her species; a curious, _injurious_ phenomenon, incidents of which seemed to occur in precise proportion to the current political climate between their General and her Imperator. Still, from a species as infamously xenophobic as the Zoah, those few "accidental" knocks and broken bones she'd suffered during this assignment were the equivalent of a big welcoming hug.

The military engineers were already waiting for them, a core cabal of Syrax's higher-ranking scientific officers clustered around the machine at the centre of the laboratory. It looked extremely out of place, in the monochrome blue of the Zoah colony: a distorted, four-meter-high sphere of clashing components and wild pseudo-organization. No matter how many times she saw it, no matter how many times she _used _it, alone or with the rest of the squad, the thing never seemed to look any more familiar. Refined kernels of Kron ore gleamed burnished crimson amidst thousands of molded Voxai psi-krystals. Gossamer strips of black Nocturnus polymer – close chemical cousins to the substance of her own uniform – coursed in intricate spirals over the surface of the device. She could even see N'rrgal technology, in there; semi-intelligent organic superlubricant, glistening darkly in between the components. Raxos had almost shut the entire project down, when he learned they were using Hive cytoplasm – and she had to admit, she could understand the General's misgivings. Even now, the liquid shifted purposefully, wetting the interfaces of those sub-machines which had already begun to spin up, as the engineers coaxed this hybrid fusion of science through its pre-activation sequences. The greatest technology of five races – five mutually antagonistic races – brought together in a single machine… it was another political impossibility, a fantasy made reality only through the undefiable will of the Imperator.

One of the scientists – Haniman, she suspected, but it was hard to tell the difference between like-ranked Zoah – turned away from the device, addressing Syrax and herself with a noise like a jungle adder made out of sandpaper.  
"We detected the signal fourteen minutes ago, High Dictator," he reported, as the Procurator busied herself in configuring the warp belt at her waist. "Distention's been holding at ninety-eight percent mean variable that entire time, which means…" the metallic giant paused, electricity crackling around the horns of his helmet-piece. You could actually _see_ the Zoah think. "…it corresponds to about two days, exo-time. You arrived at the right moment. We'll achieve hyperspatial interstice in twenty-three seconds."

Haniman shifted his attention to her, twelve feet of iron and lightning looming over the diminutive creature in a way that probably wasn't intentionally threatening; but it certainly came out that way. She didn't flinch a single muscle.

"Procurator, we had to activate the generators without running an optimized calibration sequence, so I can only guarantee you somewhere in the region of nine hundred, maybe a thousand seconds. After that…" the Zoah spread his arms, a sparking gesture of abrogation.

She scowled inside her visor, but nodded curtly. Sixteen minutes wasn't long, but it would have to be long enough.

"It's not the roboticist snooping as usual? Your certain it's the real signal?" she asked again, hoping to get a genuine answer out of the technician, since Syrax had been resolutely unforthcoming. Beside her, she could _feel_ the Dictator glower, a subtle (yet unmistakably angry) change in the texture of his statics.

"It's been almost three year since…" the scientist began; but Haniman stopped himself, acutely aware both of the Dictator's souring disposition and the fact that he had less than ten seconds left to talk through. "…Yes, Procurator. We're certain. It's a rather… distinctive trace, for the Voxai krystals. They wouldn't give us this data set by accident. Your agent-"

He'd gone over time.

A violent _bang!_ of displaced air cut off the Zoah's sentence, as the warp lab's blues were washed out by shining golden light. It span lazily, just in front of the spherical machine: a huge, glittering ring, rotating lazily about its upright axis. And other axes, too, if you looked at it for too long. Turning in directions that didn't quite _fit _inside 3D.

She was moving before the thunderclap even finished, boots dashing across the tiled floor with indecent haste. Now, for Procurator Shade of the Nocturnus, every second counted. Every -

_FLICKER_

* * *

'Haniman, you incompetent –' was the half-thought that flashed through Shade's head, as she stepped out onto SIA-47-b. Stepped out… a little higher than preferable.

She could just make out a flash of green, through the visor; and then the canopy slammed into her. Fern leaves and branches lashed at the Procurator's polymer uniform, a percussive series of vegetative _thwacks_ as she bounced off one tree limb after another. Air exploded out of the echidna's lungs as Shade felt her stomach connect with a particularly gnarled and unyielding piece of tree limb… before she was tumbling again, gravity's hungry claws determined to drag the Procurator _all_ the way down.  
Shade desperately twisted her wrists, a flailing attempt at manipulating the cog-like devices which bound the sleeves of her combat garb. The left cuff neglected to respond; but on her right, with a fierce flash of power, the leech blade buzzed to life. A pinkish wedge of force and magnetism and incomprehensible, Voxai principles; the phantasmal triangle sputtered indignantly, but Shade had no time to let the thing come online properly. Another violent impact smashed into her side; the Procurator swept her arm sideways, wedging her nascent energy-knife into the thick bark of a pine trunk.  
Gouts of woodchip and sawdust blossomed outwards as the blade gouged a pencil-thin furrow into the fabric of the towering fir. The echidna experienced a grotesque, and above all painful tingling in her forearms, as the cuff-machines mindlessly attempted to channel plant vitality into her own body. Incompatibility _hurt_.  
And the ground was still rushing towards her awfully fast…

It was only Ruin Wood's carpet of loamy mulch that saved her from crippling injury or worse. Shade hit the ground like a stone, throwing up a rustling cloud of dry leaves and pine needles. The armoured horns of her helmet clanged to rest against a rotting tree bough, sending a family of fist-sized wood-beetles scuttling away in alarm. The insectile sound of their hasty scurrying quickly receded into obscurity; and everything was quiet again.

Up above the fallen echidna, dislodged twigs and greenery still tumbled from the hole the echidna had ploughed through the treeline. At the other end of the gap, a twilight sky glimmered, pinprick stars scattered haphazardly against indigo.

She hated that sky. It was not at all unlike the place she'd just left.

Shade groaned, a sound born as much out of exasperation as pain, as she lay there amidst the mud and foliage. It was with a soldier's methodical diligence, that she checked over her arms, her legs, her chest, searching for injuries _before_ trying to move anything that might snap when she put stress upon it. It didn't feel like anything was actually broken – the uniform was a robust construction - though that consolation didn't really help to dull the pain from her unscheduled descent.

"Haniman, you incompetent..." the Procurator repeated, her epithet giving way to a pained gasp as Shade levered herself up. The black fabric on her left sleeve had been torn open, exposing the echidna's peach fur and a not inconsiderable quantity of blood to the world. Her cache of stasis grenades was gone, as well; presumably the satchel would be snagged on a branch up there somewhere.  
She couldn't really blame Haniman; she knew that, intellectually. The Zoah machinists operated the interstice machine precisely because they were _more _competent than the Nocturnus technical staff. That… and the fact that device's radiation would have killed flesh-and-blood operators within weeks. But still; sitting in a puddle of mulch at the terminal end of a ninety-foot drop, Shade could not help but entertain the hope that Syrax's chief engineer would end his days in a suitably ignominious fashion; perhaps peddling cut-rate charms to gawking idiots on the streets of the Zoah Colony.

Shade got up. Trees stretched in every direction, their omnipresence disrupted only by the occasional pile of mouldering, multicoloured stones that lent Ruin Wood the first part of its name. She touched the contraption at her wrist, again, bruised fingers skating over the dials with practiced ease. Her chronometer informed her that over two minutes had already elapsed.

Time to get moving.

* * *

The chameleonware still functioned, at least, although the gaping hole in her suit's shoulder messed up the adaptive camouflage's coverage. So it was under imperfect cloak that Shade crept tentatively through the bracken tangles, peering into the clearing's crimson firelight. Only three minutes to go. But she'd found her.  
...Or at least found _some _of her. That… thing, that the creature was merged into… she had cut a bizarre figure even before, when the technicians had plucked her out of the space between spaces, tall and furless and babbling nonsense. They had sent her onwards, this strange old woman, to reach the world that they could not. But _now_…  
It gave the echidna pause. Even with the seconds ticking away, Shade was reluctant to reveal herself; not until she could understand precisely what it _was _she was looking at. Because the woman was only half there. Vaguely silhouetted against the glow of her crackling fire, the ancient creature looked as though –

"No good hiding, dearie. She's seen you, Wendy has_ssssssss_…"

The Procurator stopped dead, her metal-shod boots freezing mid-step. That was _impossible_. The hunched crone had been stood with her back to Shade, this entire time. And in the dark; _with _the cloaking field, she couldn't have –

"Tick, tock, tick, tock, time time, **tick tock**," the crone sang, not even glancing up from the dancing flames.  
"Outside the time, she is, so she doesn't have much of it… And Wendy has somethings for her_ssssss_, she does."

The echidna grimaced inside her helmet. She was quite aware of the rapidly decreasing second count. And if she came back empty-handed… it would take at least a day, of Cage-time, to charge another interstice; months would pass, on Mobius. By which time this woman could well be dead. Shade was amazed she'd lasted this long, especially after all those… well, it must have been _years_, here, with no trace of her at all.  
So the Procurator really had no other choice.  
She turned off the chameleonware, smart polymers flipping from earthy greens and browns to the neutral matte black. And then stepped out, into the clearing.

Her conical hat perched atop a wizened brow; its peak tipped forwards, as the old human poked the fire with a stick. Above the flames, a dead gull sizzled disgustingly, skewered on a metal spit. Shade's feet trod across the carpet of sparse grasses, her fingers on the leech blade controls. A tingling sensation crawled up her spine; and not just from nerves still protesting their fall through the trees. She couldn't escape the feeling that something else was watching, from the forest. Something… malicious.

"Don't mind, don't mind, he's Wendy's friend, he is…" Witchcart crooned, again speaking as if she was reading the echidna's mind. "He's won't steal it, he won't. Not like the tricky one, is he? No, no no…"

The woman was still wearing them. That _same_ _set_ of robes: eldritch, Nocturnus fabrics, that they had given her, before. Passive stealth material, the kind they made the Velite's uniforms out of. Chemically, it was just fibres – nothing so sophisticated as Procutorial chameleonware – but the way it creased, and crinkled, was optimized, to reduce radar detectability. Shade had no way of knowing, how many times that subtle effect has saved the woman's life, as she'd trundled through the shimmering blue streets of a ruined and desolate city. Or even earlier, when the crone had first ridden the tracks that criss-crossed this very island.

As Shade drew level, the witch cracked a toothless smile, her eyes wandering randomly. With a surprisingly deft motion, she swept the hat from off her head; matted cobwebs of silvery hair shining in the light of the fire. The Procurator knew to keep her eyes on the other person's hands, in a situation like this. But she couldn't help glancing over her shoulder, as Witchcart mumbled to herself. She could _feel _the eyes of that unseen observer upon her. Shade almost thought she caught a flash of orange, through the trees… but it was gone.

The human was rummaging around inside the upturned cone of her absurd headgear. But with a victorious, slanted expression, she donned the piece back on top of her hair. Now cupped in Witchcart's withered, yellow hands, lay… things.

There were odd circles of shiny metal, encased in cuboids of clear plastic. "G.U.N. TOP SECRET", their lettering proclaimed. Five of them, indistinguishable but for the fact someone had scrawled "_Found by Charmy on Prison Island! (Shadow helped)_" in childish fonts on the top one.A sixth disk was larger, in a green sheath, with "ARK Computer Room ref224_._23962" embossed upon the metal itself. And on top of that lay a red-and-yellow… well, a brick, seemed the best way to describe it - studded with electronic ports of one sort or another. Nothing to declare its purpose, except a small symbol on the side, which looked for all the world like the face of a toothy madman. It did not escape Shade's notice, that the same symbol was repeated on the front of Witchcart's mechanical lower half.  
And finally, wedged between two of the G.U.N. disks: a tiny paper card.  
"_**Chaotix Detective Agency  
**__We never turn down work that pays_"

"What… _is _this?" the Procurator managed. They all looked like pointless nick-nacks, to her. Human data storage was not a discipline well known to the Nocturnus.  
Wendy Witchcart grinned again, stupidly. "Pays, pays, she paid them, Wendy paid. Remembered the shelly, Wendy remembered, when they do something for Wendy… The hider, and the buzzy, and the one with the teeth, teethy-teeth-teeth, they did, they found these, for Wendy, for Witchcart..."

Shade just _looked_ at her. Information; _that _was what the Imperator had charged her with collecting, and what Shade had in turn charged Wendy. Not… shiny trinkets and broken equipment. She almost, _almost_ didn't take them. But she couldn't return with nothing. Syrax would do more than just break her arm again. _"A terrible, tragic accident, of course…"_

The Procurator grimly removed the items Witchcart offered her, depositing them in a field satchel. Useless they might be, but at least it would give the Zoah scientists something to look at.  
Only once the curios were securely tucked away, did Shade truly appreciate the lightness of those pieces of junk; and the terrible pointlessness of this whole journey. It cost in the region of fifty thousand rings, to activate the interstice portal, and escape that damnable Cage for all of what, a quarter of an hour? She had to get _something _substantive. She had to try, in the little time she had left.

Tapping her wrists again, Shade ordered her helmet to disengage.  
There was a hissing sound, and a clang of metal segments folding together right next to her ears. The armour plates within the Procurator's curving horns collapsed together; sliding, retracting, setting her dreadlocks free. The faceplate slid up over her eyes, technologically-expanded sensorium reducing down to the mere visible wavelengths that her eyes could process on their own. She felt moving Kron steel scuff past the fur on her temple; and then it was over, the entire ensemble headgear compressed down to a thick band of metal and polymer, perched over her forehead.  
It was, Shade realized, the very first time she'd breathed the unfiltered air of her home planet.  
Mobius smelled of old mints.

"Did you find him?" Shade asked the wizened human, pointing to her face with an obsidian glove. "Like me? The other echidna. The one who _looks_ _like_ _me_. Did you see the red-"

"Red one, red one, red, two, red one!" Witchcart cackled, finishing the Nocturnus' sentence for her, as though sharing an incredibly funny punchline. "The red one, with the shiny, the green shiny! Outside the time, they know him, she knows, knows, but Wendy doesn't… they knew him too, that never turns down work that pays, but not Wendy, no, no. Land of the Sky, land in the sky! That's where, that's where…"

_FLICKER_

And Argus took her back.

* * *

"Gone, gone gone.

Gone again. She never did stays, for soup, she didn't. The one in black… tick tock, tick tock, always rushing, no time, no time…

He comes, bob-bob, bob-bob, Wendy's friend, he bobs. Watching, he was, always watching. Wendy's friend, Witchcart's friend…

Done here now, Wendy is. She likes it here, she does, they put her here, with the carts, the carts, but now she has her own. Fatty gave it her, he did, he did, gave it her and took her shoes, he did, and taught him to dance. He's a good boy, the Eggman is, a good boy, but he has a temper. Backwards, he was… Wendy knows, Wendy knows.

We can go, my dearie, foxy foxy fox fox. Things to do, things to do, Witchcart has.

Things to do, things to do. And mint candies for afters…"

* * *

**_END_**


End file.
